'We would be duly grateful,' said Father McGuire. Sylvia said nothing. The furrow between her eyes made her seem like a scowling little witch.
' Sylvia, why don't you come for a holiday to New York?'
‘And indeed you should,’ said the priest,’ so you should, my child.'
' Thank you. I'll think about it. ' She did not look at him.
‘And will you drop in something for us to the Pynes? Just drop it, no need to go in, if you are in a hurry. '
They went to the Volvo and the sack for the Pynes was put in the back.
‘I’ll send you the books, darling, ' he said to Sylvia.
A couple of weeks later a sack arrived, by special messenger, from Senga, by motorbike. Books, from New York, delivered by plane to Senga, collected by InterGlobe, who attended to the Customs, and brought them all the way here. ‘What did that cost?' asked Father McGuire, offering tea to the exile from the bright lights of Senga.
'You mean, all of it?’ said the messenger, a smart young black man, in a uniform. ‘Well, it's here. ' He brought out the papers. ' That will have cost the sender just on a hundred pounds, to get them here,' he said, admiring the size of the sum.
‘We could build a reading room with that, or an infant's nursery,’ said Sylvia.
‘We must not look a gift horse in the mouth,’ said the priest.
‘I’m looking at it in the mouth,’ said Sylvia. She was scanning the list of books. Andrew had given her list to his secretary, who had mislaid it. So she went to the nearest big bookstore and ordered all the bestsellers, feeling complacent, and even sated, as if she had actually read them herself: she did fully intend to start reading soon. The novels were all unsuitable for Sylvia's library. In due course they were given to Edna Pyne, who complained continually that she had read all her books a hundred times. 'To her who has, it shall be given.'
The history of the hospital Andrew did not hear was this.
During the Liberation War this whole area, miles of it, had been full of the fighters, because it was hilly, with caves and ravines, good for guerilla war. One night Father McGuire had woken to see standing over him a youth pointing a gun at him, and saying, ' Get up, put your hands up. ' The priest was stiff with sleep and slow at the best of times, and the youth swore at him and told him he would be shot if he didn't hurry. But this was a very young man, eighteen, or even younger, and he was more frightened than Father McGuire: the rifle was shaking. 'I'm coming,’ said Father McGuire, clumsily getting out of bed, but he couldn't keep his hands up, he needed them. ' Just take it easy, ' he said, ‘I’m coming. ' He put on his dressing-gown while the gun waved about near him, and then he said, ‘What do you want?'
'We want medicine, we want muti. One of us very sick.'
' Then come to the bathroom. ' In the medicine cabinet were not much more than malaria tablets and aspirin and some bandages. ' Take what you need, ' he said.
‘Is that all? I don't believe you,’ said the youth. But he took everything there was, and said, ‘We want a doctor to come. '
‘Let us go to the kitchen,’ said the priest. There he said, ' Sit down. ' He made tea, put biscuits out, and watched while they vanished. He took a couple of loaves of Rebecca's new bread and handed them over, with some cold meat. These things vanished into a cloth bundle.
‘How can I get a doctor here? What shall I say? You people keep ambushing this road. '
' Say you are sick and need a doctor. When you expect him tie a bit of cloth to that window. We shall be watching and we'll bring our comrade. He's wounded. '
‘I’ll try,’ said the priest. As the youth disappeared into the night he turned to threaten: ' Don't tell Rebecca we were here. '
' So you know Rebecca?'
'We know everything.'
Father McGuire thought, then wrote to a colleague in Senga, saying a doctor was needed for an unusual case. He should drive out in daytime, not stop the car for anything, and be sure he had his gun with him. ‘And be careful not to alarm our good sisters. ' A telephone call: a discreet exchange, apparently about the weather and the state of the crops. Then, ‘I shall visit you with Father Patrick. He has had medical training. '
The priest tied a cloth to the window and hoped Rebecca did not notice. She said nothing: he knew she understood much more than she let on. The car arrived with the priests in it. That night two guerillas appeared, saying their comrade was too ill to be moved. They needed antibiotics. The priests had brought antibiotics, together with a good supply of medicines. They were all handed over, while Father Patrick prescribed. Again the larder was emptied of what was left while two half-starving young men had eaten as much as they could.
Father McGuire went on living in this house that anyone could enter at any time. The nuns lived inside a security fence, but he hated it: he said he felt like a prisoner even going inside it to visit them. In his own house, he was exposed, and he knew he was watched. He expected to be murdered: white people had been killed not far away. Then the war ended. Two youths came to the house and said they were there to say thank you. Rebecca fed them, when she was ordered to do it. She said to the priest, ' They are bad people. '
He asked what had happened to the wounded man: he had died. After that he saw them around: they were unemployed and angry because they had believed Liberation would see them in fine jobs and good houses. He employed one at the school as an odd-job man. The other was Joshua's eldest son, who started school in a class full of small children: he spoke pretty good English, but could not read or write. Now he was sick, very thin, and with sores.
Father McGuire did not mention these events to anyone, until he told Sylvia. Rebecca did not speak of them. The nuns did not know of them.
He had to keep an ever-enlarging supply of medicines in his house, because people came to ask for them. He built the shacks and shed down the hill, and asked Senga for a doctor to come: Comrade President Matthew had promised free medicine for everybody. He was sent a young man who had not finished his medical training, because of the war: he had intended to be a medical orderly. Father McGuire did not know this until one night the young man got drunk and said he wanted to finish his training, could Father McGuire help him? Father McGuire said, When you stop drinking, I'll write the letter for you. But the war had damaged this fighter, who had been twenty when it started: he could not stop drinking. This was 'the doctor' that Joshua had told Sylvia about. Father McGuire, in a chatty letter to Senga, complained that there was no hospital for twenty miles and no doctor. It happened that a priest visiting London had met Sylvia, with Father Jack. And so it had all happened.
But there was a good hospital planned for ten miles away, and when that opened, this disgraceful place – Sylvia said – could cease to be.
‘Why disgraceful?’ said the priest. ' It does good things. It was a good day for us all when you came. You are a blessing for us. '
And why had the good sisters up the hill not been a blessing?
The four who had seen out the dangers of the war had not always been behind their security fence. They taught at the school, when it had still been a good one. The war ended and they left. They were white women, but the nuns who replaced them were black, young women who had escaped from poverty, dreariness and sometimes danger into the blue and white uniforms that set them aside from other black women. They were not educated and could not teach. They found themselves in this place which was a horror to them, not an escape from poverty, but a reminder ofit. There were four of them, Sister Perpetua, Sister Grace, Sister Ursula, Sister Boniface. The ' hospital' was not one, and when
Joshua ordered them to come every day they were back where they had escaped from: under the domination of a black man who expected to be waited on. They found excuses not to go, and Father McGuire did not insist: the fact was, they were pretty useless. Gentility was what they had chosen, not suppurating limbs. By the time Sylvia arrived the enmity between them and Joshua was such that every time they saw him they said they would pray for
him, and he taunted, insulted and cursed them in return.
They did wash bandages and dressings while complaining they were dirty and disgusting, but their energies really went into the church which was as pretty and well-kept as the churches that had beckoned them to become nuns when they were girls. Those churches had been the cleanest and finest buildings for miles and now this one at St Luke's Mission, like those, never had a speck of dust, because it was swept several times a day, and the statues of Christ and the Virgin were polished and gleaming, and when dust swirled the nuns were up shutting doors and windows and sweeping it up before it even settled. The good sisters were serving the church and Father McGuire, and, said Joshua, mimicking them, they clucked like chickens whenever he came near.
They were often sick, because then they could return to Senga and their mother house.
Joshua sat all day under the big acacia tree while sunlight and shadow sifted over him, and watched what went on at the hospital, but often through eyes that distorted what he saw. He was smoking dagga almost continually. His little boy Clever was always with Sylvia, and then there were two children, Clever and Zebedee. They could not have been further from the adorable black piccanin with long curly lashes that sentiment loves. They were lean, with bony faces where burned enormous eyes hungry to learn and -it became evident – hungry for food too. They arrived at the hospital at seven, unfed, and Sylvia made them come up to the house where she cut them slabs of bread and jam, while Rebecca watched, and once remarked that her children did not get bread and jam, but only cold porridge, and not always that. Father McGuire watched and said that Sylvia was now the mother of two children and he hoped she knew what she was doing. 'But they have a mother,' she said, and he said no, their own mother had died on the violent roads of Zimlia, and their father had died of malaria, and so they had become Joshua's responsibility: they called him Father. Sylvia was relieved to hear this history. Joshua had already lost two children – another had just died – and she knew why, and what the real reason was – not the 'Pneumonia' that was on their death certificates. So these two were not Joshua's by blood: how useful, how painfully pertinent that old phrase had become. They were both clever, as Joshua had claimed for Clever: he said that his brother had been a teacher and his sister-in-law had been first in her class. The little boys watched every movement she made, and copied her, and examined her face and eyes as she spoke, so they knew what she wanted them to do before she asked; they looked after the chickens and the sitting hens, they collected eggs and never broke one, they ran about with mugs of water and medicines for the patients. They squatted on either side of her watching when she set limbs or lanced swellings, and she had to keep reminding herself they were six and four, not twice those ages. They were sponges for information. But they were not at school. Sylvia made them come up to the house at four o'clock, when she had finished at the hospital, and set them lessons. Other children wanted to join in: Rebecca's, for a start. Soon, she was running what amounted to a little nursery school. But when the others wanted to be like Clever and Zebedee and work at the hospital, she said no. Why did she favour them, it wasn't fair? She made the excuse that they were orphans. But there were other orphans at the village. ‘Well, my child,’ said the priest, ' and now you begin to understand why people's hearts break in Africa. Do you know the story of the man who was asked why he was walking along the beach after a storm throwing stranded starfish back into the sea, when there were thousands of them who must die? He replied that he did it because the few he could save would find themselves back in the sea and be happy.' 'Until the next storm – were you going to say that, Father?' 'No, but I might be thinking it. And I am interested that you might be thinking on those lines too. ' 'You mean, I am thinking more realistically – as you put it, Father?' 'Yes, I do, I do put it like that. But I've told you often enough, you have too many stars in your eyes for your own good. '
The Studebaker lorry, an old rattler donated by the Pynes to the Mission, to replace the Mission lorry which had finally met its death, stood waiting on the track. Sylvia had told Rebecca to say in the village that she was going to the Growth Point and could take six people in the back. About twenty had already clambered in. With Sylvia stood Rebecca and two of her children – she had insisted they should have the treat, not Joshua's children, not this time.
Sylvia said to the people in the back that the tyres were very old and could easily burst. No one moved. The Mission had its name down for tyres, even second-hand tyres, but it was a forlorn hope. Then Rebecca spoke in first one local language and then another and in English. No one moved and a woman said to Sylvia, ' Drive slowly and it will be okay. '
Sylvia and Rebecca jumped into the front seat with the two children. The lorry set off, crawling. At the Pynes' turn-off they were waved down by the Pynes' cook who said he had to get into the Growth Point, there was no food in his house and his wife... Rebecca laughed, and there was much laughter at the back and he climbed up, and fitted himself in somehow. Rebecca sat beside Sylvia and turned to watch the back – where they were laughing and teasing the cook: there was some drama Sylvia would never know about.
The Growth Point was five miles from the Mission. The white government had created the idea that there should be a network of nuclei around which townships would grow: a shop, a government office, the police, a church, a garage. The idea was successful, and the black government claimed it as theirs. No one argued. This Growth Point was still in embryo but expanding: there were half a dozen little houses, a new supermarket. Sylvia parked outside the government office, a small building sitting in pale dust where some dogs lay asleep. Everyone piled out of the lorry, but Rebecca's boys had to stay in it, to guard it, otherwise everything would be stolen off it, including the tyres. They were given some Pepsi and a bun each, with instructions that if anyone at all looked as if theft was planned one must run and tell their mother.
The two women went together into the office, whose waiting-room already had a dozen people in it, and sat together at the end of a bench. Sylvia was the only white person there, but with her burned skin, and in her headscarf, for the dust, she and Rebecca were like each other, two small thin women, both with worried faces, in the timeless scene, petitioners waiting, lulled by boredom. From inside, beyond a door that had on it, Mr M. Mandizi, faded white paint on brown, came a loud hectoring voice. Sylvia grimaced at Rebecca who grimaced back. Time passed. The door suddenly opened and there appeared a young black girl, in tears.
'Shame,' said an old black man, who was well down in the queue. He clicked his tongue and shook his head, and said, ' Shame' loudly, as a large and imposing black man, in the obligatory three-piece suit, stood there and impressed them all. He said, ' Next' , and stood back, shutting the door, so that the next petitioner had to knock, and hear, ' Come in' .
Time passed. This one came out successful: at least, he was not crying. And he clapped his hands together gently, not looking at anyone, so that the salutation or applause was for himself. The loud voice from inside: ' Next. '
Sylvia sent Rebecca with some money to buy the children some lunch and a drink, and to make sure they were there. They were, asleep. Rebecca brought a Fanta back, which the two women shared.
A couple of hours passed.
Then, it was their turn, and the official, seeing that this was a white woman, was about to summon the man next on the bench when the old man said, 'Shame. The white woman is waiting like the rest of us.'
'It is for me to say who comes next,' said Mr Mandizi.
' Okay,’ said the old man, ' but it is not right, what you are doing. We don't like what you are doing. '
Mr Mandizi hesitated, but then pointed at Sylvia and went back in.
Sylvia smiled thanks at the old man, and Rebecca spoke softly to him in their language. Laughter all around. What was the joke? Again, Sylvia was thinking she would never know. But Rebecca whispered to her as they went in to the office, 'I told him he was like an old bull who knows how to keep the
young ones in order. '
They arrived in front of Mr Mandizi still smiling. He glanced up from papers, frowned, saw Rebecca was there, and was about to speak sharply to her when she began on the ritual greeting.
'Good morning – no, I see it is already afternoon. So, good afternoon.'
' Good afternoon, ' he replied
‘I hope you are well. '
‘I am well if you are well...’ and so on, and even truncated it was an impressive reminder of good manners.
Then, to Sylvia: ‘What do you want?'
' Mr Mandizi, I am from St Luke's Mission, and I have come to ask why the supply of condoms has not been sent. It was due from you last month. '
Mr Mandizi seemed to swell, and he half rose from his desk, and his startled look became offended. He subsided and said, ‘And why am I expected to talk to a woman about condoms? It is not what I expect to hear?'
‘I am the doctor at the Mission hospital. The government last year said that condoms were being made available for all bush hospitals.'
Clearly Mr Mandizi had not heard of this ukase, but now he gave himself time by dabbing at his forehead, bright with sweat, with a very large white handkerchief. His was the kind of face that has to labour for authority. It was by nature amiable, and wanting to please: the frown he imposed on it didn't suit him. 'And what may I ask are you going to do with all these condoms?'
'Mr Mandizi, you must have heard that there is a bad disease... it is a new very bad disease and it is transmitted by sexual intercourse.'
His face was that of a man being forced to swallow unpleasantness.
‘Yes, yes, ' he said, ' but we know that this disease is an invention of the whites. It is to make us wear condoms, so that we do not have children and our people become weakened. '
' Forgive me, Mr Mandizi, but you are out of date. It is true that your government was saying that AIDS does not exist but now they say that perhaps it may exist, and so men should wear condoms.'
The Sweetest Dream Page 34