Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  He sweats. I draw the curtains in the room. As time goes by, there is more to tending him, and the hours are not as dull. He bleeds from every orifice, tiny private trickles of blood that stain the sheet. He bleeds from his ears, his nose. When he goes to the toilet, which he does very seldom and only with my help, the water is full of blood. He even, toward the end, begins to bleed from his eyes. This, more than anything that has gone before, reaches me in a terrible way. I stare, numb with horror, as thick red tears well up at the corners of his eyes and move slowly over his cheeks.

  But I clean the sheets. I change his linen daily and air the room. I help him to the bathroom and wash him. As he becomes weaker, I wash him in bed with a flannel and a tub of water. I bring him food, which he chews with difficult movements of his jaw. It hurts him to swallow and to talk.

  I think of the growth in his throat as a ghastly crimson plant, inching up towards the light. It has reached tentacles into his nose, his ears, the sockets behind his eyes. So, the blood. He does not seem alarmed at the progress of this foreign presence he must be able to sense in himself. Perhaps he doesn’t care. When he tries to talk, the words are blurred by the choked hole of his neck. Often I cannot understand what he says. On occasions I find myself shouting at him.

  ‘Speak properly!’ I say. ‘Express yourself.’

  I’m not a patient woman, but I hate myself for these outbursts against what he cannot help. I hug him afterwards and tell him I’m sorry. Often, without warning to either of us, I burst into tears. It is he who consoles me then, patting at my shoulder with a spidery hand.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you to cry.’

  I can’t explain to him why I do, or what is happening to him. He knows only that he’s sick. This he accepts, along with the assumption that he will be well again. We discuss it no further between us, though I dread the questions he could ask.

  I think he’s too occupied, however, with the business of enduring. I cannot imagine what it is he’s undergoing, far below the surface of himself. It must take great resources of spirit to resist this onslaught that never lets up, minute to minute to minute. As I am concerned with my own survival, so must he be with his. I can do nothing to help him, as he can do nothing for me. We have, both of us, been put under siege by a force far stronger than ourselves. We can but wait.

  He suffers. The pain that began as a twinge has grown in him till now it has overflowed his body and, I dare say, reaches far beyond the house. I see it sometimes as almost a tangible thing: a kind of light that burns out of his face. It flickers around the bed. For reasons I don’t understand, this pain seems worst at night. It builds in him till he doesn’t know what to do with it. Then I watch as, a translucent skeletal figure, he stands up out of bed and begins to dance about the room. He dashes himself against objects, against walls and tables. He tears at his hair. Huge liquid moans rise from him in bubbles, floating up and bursting loudly against the roof. He does ridiculous things. He tears his clothes. He pulls down his pants and pulls them up again. He wrenches himself from side to side, wiping snot and tears across his mouth, braying and calling, gnashing and swearing. All this – this helpless, hopeless activity – to ward off the nerves in his body.

  There is nothing at these times that I or medicine can do for him. It happens so often, with such regularity, that his dance ceases to move me. I sit silently by in the deep armchair and watch him as he cavorts back and forth, to and fro. Once or twice I cannot contain my frustration; I tear at my own hair; I shout. ‘Stop!’ I say. ‘You’re driving me crazy! Please stop and lie down.’ He doesn’t hear or obey.

  But eventually he lies again. Drenched with sweat, gasping with exhaustion, still twitching with sharp flashes from within, he sprawls on the bed. Holding the sheet in his fists and between his teeth, he falls asleep.

  In the end, I move into the room. I cannot bear to abandon him here each night and return to my own room next door, where my husband lies waiting. I experience each morning a feeling of dread as I get up, head buzzing with fatigue, and stagger back through to David. One night, unbeknown to me, he will stop breathing while I am asleep. If this is to happen, I would want to be there.

  I tell Stephen. ‘I’m going to ask Moses to move the spare bed in.’

  Unexpectedly, he glares at me. We are sitting in the kitchen, at the breakfast table, where I have cooked for him before he goes to work. ‘And me?’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I blink, surprised.

  ‘I mean that I hardly see you anymore. You spend your time, all your time, in that room. What do you think you can do all night? Can you save his life?’

  ‘Don’t speak like that to me.’ My voice has come out of me far higher and sharper than I intended. We stare at each other over the table, while the room rocks about us.

  ‘I am tired of this,’ he says in a low and threatening voice. ‘I don’t know how much you think I can put up with. You are not the only person in this house –’

  ‘And nor are you.’ I am standing before I know it, lashing out with my arms. I catch the plate of egg before him and it flies, it breaks. He is sitting, staring at me, while I give in to myself. I seize the pitcher of orange juice and throw it to the floor. I fling the knives, the forks. ‘That is your son,’ I scream. ‘Do you think I want him ill? Do you think I made things this way?’

  He also stands now, so that we are facing each other eye to eye. He leans towards me, balancing a fist on the table.

  ‘Dr Bouch called me,’ he says. ‘He told me he asked you to take David to hospital.’

  ‘Yes?’ I say. I’m gasping now as I cry. I smooth down my hair.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he says.

  ‘Because it doesn’t matter. Because he isn’t going. I don’t believe in what they’re going to do to him. Stephen,’ I say, shaking my head, ‘Stephen, Stephen.’

  He looks at me for a long long time. Then he slowly straightens and goes out of the room.

  That night he tells me he’s sorry. We’re standing on the back stoep, looking out on the forest that falls away below us. The moon is up, a bowl of light.

  ‘The strain is getting to me,’ he says.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I tell him. ‘I’m sorry too.’

  But we do not touch as we stand, facing out towards the moon over the low tops of the trees. There is a chill in the air. I am chilled, too, by this moment of raw honesty which we have never been capable of before. I discover for the first time that Stephen has feelings.

  Nevertheless, I have had the spare bed moved into David’s room. My vigil, now, extends into the dark. There is no longer such a thing as day or night in the narrow room: it’s easy to be unaware of what takes place outside. I am always here; I go out only to the toilet and bath and for the occasional breath of air. Otherwise I sit or stand or lie within reach of the bed, trying to combat what my body demands: I force myself to stay awake. Even when David has fallen asleep I recite rhymes to myself, pinch my thighs, to keep from blacking out. I watch over him.

  In this dreadful time, this most solitary of confinements, I become intimate with every detail of the room. I notice things I have never noticed before: the fraying edge of the coverlet, faces in the wallpaper. A tiny crack in the windowsill where ants are nesting. My mind roams over these things in search of escape, but must, in the end, turn inward.

  To me, and what I contain. A communication develops between David and myself that is not based on words. He moves his third finger when he wants water. He rolls his eyes when he needs to piss. I respond to these calls, aiding the functions of his body in their task of keeping him alive. But my mind, trapped in this stillness, draws up from itself a constant stream of images from the past. I see David as a baby. My tired brown nipple is in his mouth. I teach him to walk. I teach him how to use the toilet. Questions follow these images: have I been a good mother to him? Have I given him what he needs? What unknowable damages have I committed in my laziness, my ignorance? What?
What? I shake my head to clear the web of words.

  The questions sing upon the air.

  Beyond this room, other lives, like satellites, continue in their orbit. I see Stephen from time to time, when he comes into the room after work, or sits with us for a while before bed. Salome still makes meals (mashed food now, all that David can swallow) and brings them in. I see Moses, and sometimes my mother, as they walk past the window outside. But these people are strange to me, like friends remembered from long ago. They don’t touch in any real way on my existence here, on David’s, in the tiny space between these four walls. They go about a separate business to us, not knowing, as we do, how sordid a thing this waiting is, how wearisome this agony.

  Stephen now does the shopping. He eats alone at the table in the evenings, waited upon by Salome, who has been asked to stay late. There was a time when we would all eat together, assembled in uncomfortable silence in one corner of the kitchen. I suppose it’s a blessing to be free of obligations like these. Now, after eating, Stephen comes through and joins me. He sits on the opposite side of the bed, leaning forward in his chair, hands between his knees. Neither of us speaks, to each other or to David. (David can barely talk anymore, his throat is too small.) In silence we sit, glancing at each other now and then, with the huge white bed between us.

  Dr Bouch comes to visit in the mornings. I have little to say to him. Since he phoned Stephen without my knowledge, my fury for him is unbridled. I grunt if he speaks to me, but he has nothing to offer, no new insights to surprise me. He comes each morning, looks into David’s mouth, and departs soon after, shrugging as he goes.

  I too am ill. My mouth is sore, full of little white blisters that have come out on my tongue and gums. I itch. The room is hazy about me now, seen through eyes filmed over with blood. Perhaps, if I will myself to it, I shall crack and die before David does. But I don’t think so: there is that in me which shall go on, and go on, and go on. I know too well.

  I hear a wailing from outside. Leaning against the wall, I go out to the door and see, in the middle of the lawn, the white corpse of my mother’s dog. She stands over it, wrenching her hands.

  ‘Ohh,’ she cries. ‘Look what’s happened now.’

  I go to her across the lawn, unbalanced in the blinding sun. The dog is lying on its side, tongue sticking stiff and pink from its mouth. Fleas are jumping off its cooling skin. I take my mother by the hand.

  ‘He won’t get up,’ she cries. ‘Make him get up.’

  I take her inside. I tell Moses to bury the animal in the forest and I lead my stricken mother back with me to the room. She quietens quickly, forgetting soon the dreadful silence of the wretched white beast. But I, strangely, can not: for the first time in many weeks I begin to cry. Tears force their way from me, pushing up like lava through tunnels clenched shut. I sob into my hand, firing my grief like a gun. She watches me, composed, as I mourn the passing of that limping poodle as I do my life, the farm, my child, the man I married.

  Then I get up and close the curtains.

  ‘Pooh,’ says my mother. ‘It smells in here.’

  It does. A stale stench is on the air: the fumes of sweat and blood and bile. It’s hard to breathe.

  The days go by. Let it end, I think. Let it end.

  But it doesn’t end. It just keeps on, spinning out like a tale without a theme. I wait and wait and wait, till it seems I have heard no other sound in forty-two years than the dragging wheeze of David trying to draw breath.

  I go in search of the other doctor. Late one night, after Stephen has gone to bed and David has finally fallen asleep, I stand up and leave the house. I move over the quietly prickling lawn, past the doorway to my mother’s rooms where she is also standing, torch in hand, staring at the sky. She watches me as I go, but doesn’t call out. I make my way down the grass-edged drive to the iron gate all wound about with vines and step out into the cool dust road that runs under the trees. I stand there for a moment. The night is still.

  I pass over the road and onto the bare path that runs up toward the tops of the mountains. I know the way because I’ve walked it before. I begin to climb.

  Though I have looked for him before without success, I’ve never tried at night. He must have a fire, I tell myself, by which I will track him down. I will see the light, like a little red window, shining from his cave.

  But there is no fire. I walk and walk till I am gasping and falling, and my dress is full of thorns. The path trails out and I leave it behind. I climb through the jungled trees like an ape; like a creature on the hunt. The other night animals going about their ways are startled by me. They stop and stare from a distance, hooding their burning eyes, as I go past.

  Perhaps he too has heard me approach. Perhaps he too has doused his fire and is standing at the mouth of his cave, hands on hips, watching with interest as I stagger by. Or perhaps he doesn’t exist after all, never has, except in the cave of my head. I have paid tribute to him there often enough: knelt before him in his skins and beads, with bone-throwing hands.

  When I am too tired to go farther I stop and look down the valley. All is in darkness: the gorges, the gullies, the slopes of trees; except for where, far, far below, the town softly glimmers in a puddle of light. Our house is invisible from here. I turn and go back.

  I arrive home aching and bruised. My mother is standing in the same place she was when I left, the torch still flickering dimly in her hand. She watches me as I go by.

  I pack our bags and I take David to the city.

  TWO

  5

  It is extraordinary, after all, how swiftly one adjusts. What I had dreaded most about a life in the city was the establishment of routine, but within a day (a few days, perhaps) I have become accustomed to the way things work. Nothing, in the end, has changed very much. I continue to spend my time at the side of David’s bed. As before, I read to him or talk. From time to time other people enter, but now it’s no longer my mother, or Salome bearing trays of food. Strangers come in to tend to David. They treat me kindly, these people, all of them dressed in white. They are doctors and nurses, gliding across the smooth-tiled floor like religious visions.

  If anything, it’s easier for me here. I no longer have to wash David, or feed him, or take him to the toilet. There are other people to do these things for me, professional people whose job it is to care for the sick. It is up to me only to sit by him and be his mother.

  It is a pleasant room. The walls are painted a gentle blue, the curtains are white. There is very little in here, other than the bed and the chair on which I like to sit. There is a cupboard, but it is empty.

  When David sleeps, which he does often, I like to look out of the window at the streets below. I can see buildings from up here, biting into the sky like teeth.

  It’s a hard place, this city, and I am afraid of it. Things move here more swiftly than I am used to. Cars surge in the streets. People jostle and push on the pavements. When I walk home or in town, I keep close to the edges of buildings so as not to be in the way.

  But in here it is different. In the quiet interior of the ward there is no hint of the frenzy outside. People pass. This is a world populated by strange and curious beasts: men in pyjamas, in wheelchairs, women in bathrobes, on stretchers. There is a sharp singeing smell to everything. Voices are soft, playing in the background like relaxing music. I don’t know much about these other people, and I have spoken to few of them. There is, I know, another small boy at the end of the passage whose mother comes to visit him. His name is Jason. His mother’s name is Sarah. She seizes me one day in the corridor, her eyes round as bullet-holes, her mouth working. ‘You’re the …’ she gasps, ‘the other . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am.’

  ‘I am so sorry. I know, believe me, how it feels.’

  ‘Yes?’ I stare at her, alarmed.

  ‘We must,’ she says, ‘get together for tea. And talk.’

  ‘All right,’ I say, and she lets me go. But in truth I have
no desire to meet her over tea. I think we have nothing to say to each other.

  I ask David if he knows Jason.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I never get out of bed.’

  This is so: he must lie as he is, moving only from side to side. In two months now he has not taken a single step.

  ‘Would you like to meet him? Would that be nice?’

  ‘No.’ He pulls a face. David is shy, and dislikes other boys.

  ‘He’s also sick,’ I urge him. ‘He’s also lonely.’

  ‘I’m not lonely.’ His lip is trembling. I become impatient, but control myself in time.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

  ‘Okay.’

  His voice is tinny, like the voice of a ghost. To speak he must cover the hole in his throat with one hand, or all the air comes hissing out.

  ‘Why is the hole here?’

  ‘So that you can breathe.’

  ‘How did they make it?’

  ‘With a knife.’

  ‘Did you watch them do it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did it bleed?’

  ‘I suppose it must have.’

  All these questions. I smile. I suppose I should be grateful to see him this way, a resurrected version of himself. But I have been told over and over by Professor Terry that I must not raise my hopes.

  Professor Terry is the man I have travelled all this way to find: a substitute for Dr Bouch. He is large, built like a construction worker rather than a physician. His hands, too, are brutal and big. But his face is delicate, made of fine bones. It’s the face of a pure man; clean-shaven, smooth-skinned, pale. He wears glasses when he reads. He has grey hair oiled down perfectly like a cap.

  It is Professor Terry who has explained to me the nature and course of my son’s disease. I listen, intrigued and dismayed, to what dreadful events were taking place in his body while I sat by. The cells, Professor Terry explains, go mad. They divide and reproduce endlessly, out of control. I shift in my seat, unnerved at this description of nature gone berserk.