Evening Primrose

by Kopano Matlwa

  Also by Kopano Matlwa

  Coconut

  Spilt Milk

  New York • London

  © 2016 by Kopano Matlwa

  By agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

  Jacket image: © shutterstock

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to permissions@quercus.com.

  e-ISBN 978-1-63506-034-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Matlwa, Kopano, author.

  Title: Evening primrose / Kopano Matlwa.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Quercus, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017045361 (print) | LCCN 2017051543 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635060348 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635060355 (library ebook) | ISBN 9781635060324 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635060331 (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: South Africa—Politics and government—1994—Fiction. | Health services accessibility—South Africa—Fiction. | Women physicians—Fiction. | Medical fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Medical.

  Classification: LCC PR9369.4.M387 (ebook) | LCC PR9369.4.M387 E94 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045361

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  For Laone

  For Palesa

  For Sindiswa

  For Shivani

  For Khetiwe

  For Karabo

  For Phindile

  For Nomsa

  For Oratilwe

  For Rudo

  For Lebohang

  For Mandisa

  For Dineo

  For Akhona

  For Lucy

  For Thabitha

  For Lerato

  For Katlego

  For Lulama

  For Yolandi

  For Funeka

  For Kudzai

  For Thandeka

  For Ilse

  For Boitumelo

  For Andile

  For Gugulethu

  For Marea

  For Nolitha

  For Lesedi

  For Tshepiso

  For Sibongile

  For Hope

  For Grace

  For you

  For me

  For our daughters

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 1

  Oh my soul, why are you so downcast within me?

  Psalm 43:5

  People say that in heaven we’ll be happy all the time. We won’t cry, we won’t feel any pain, we won’t be afraid, we’ll never worry. Things will be perfect. I once mentioned at Bible Study Group that I found this difficult to imagine. I found the whole idea of it exhausting, like a party that never ends. I’d begun to worry that I wouldn’t cope in heaven, that I wouldn’t fit in with all the giddy people. But Father Joshua’s wife said I should imagine the last time I felt extremely happy and filled with joy. Heaven would be like that moment, just frozen forever.

  I tried to think back to graduation, a happy day for me. Bits of the Declaration of Geneva of the World Medical Association came back to me.

  I solemnly pledge myself to consecrate my life to the service of humanity . . . The health of my patient will be my first consideration . . .

  I’d been practicing those words daily in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, and as we stood there in our gowns saying them in chorus, they fell like notes of high music emanating from my lips.

  I remembered waiting for them to call out my name so I could go up to the stage to receive my certificate. There were many of us in the hall, and I was sitting next to people in my class I didn’t know very well, the ones I sat next to only during registration, exams, and any other event that required alphabetical ordering. The speeches were long and I couldn’t see Ma, so my mind slipped to the fantasies I’d been having for weeks, fantasies about all the things I would do as soon as I graduated.

  I pictured myself applying for a clothing account and the lady behind the counter saying “Title, please?” as she typed my details into the system. “Doctor,” I’d say. Then I’d open a movie card, and again they’d ask, “Miss or Mrs.?” and I’d say, “Neither, it’s Doctor.” Then again at the bank, and when booking a flight, and when visiting the dentist. Again and again and again. I’d say it slowly, say it loudly, drag it out, repeat it if I thought they might not have heard the first time. I remember laughing to myself as I sat there between L-ab and L-ij. I couldn’t get used to the idea. In just a few minutes I would be a doctor!

  A rumor had started that car companies would be waiting at the back of the hall after our graduation ceremony, and brokers waiting to give us mortgages without deposits, as our titles were surety enough. Someone else said there would be financial advisers, too, handing out platinum credit cards with our names already printed on them. I knew all this was nonsense. But I kept turning my head, just in case.

  And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years, and had suffered many things of many physicians, and spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse, when she heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and touched His garment. For she said, if I may touch but His clothes, I shall be whole. And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. And Jesus, immediately knowing in Himself that virtue had gone out of Him, turned Him about in the press, and said “Who touched My clothes?” And His disciples said unto Him, “Thou seest the multitude thronging Thee and sayest Thou, ‘Who touched Me?’” And He looked round about to see her that had done this thing. But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before Him, and told Him all the truth. And He said unto her, “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace and be whole of thy plague.”

  Mark 5:25–34

  When I first started to bleed, I thought Ma would kill me. I was a naughty child, putting my fingers where I shouldn’t, feeling parts of my body I had no business touching. So when, at the Rand Easter Show, I saw a stain on my Tinker Bell knickers, I didn’t cry like most little girls would. No, I knew immediately that it was my punishment from God, and hid the evidence. I hid it for days. I collected wads of toilet paper and wrapped them round and round my Woolies full briefs. It was scratchy and uncomfortable, but nothing compared to the discomfort I knew would come with confessing to Ma that I had sinned and was bleeding as a result. That would surely be the end of me. So when I stood on the tips of my tallest toes and pulled the garage door closed on our way to church one S
unday morning, revealing beneath my Scottish Highland–style dress a dark secret that had, until then, remained hidden between my thighs, and Ma asked as I got back into the car what those spots on my glitter tights were, I knew for sure that this was the beginning of my end.

  And in some ways it was, because as if in eager response to Ma’s question, a floodgate opened within me and blood poured out between my thighs, down my legs, and even onto my Jelly Baby shoes. It continued this way for weeks, easing up for a few days at a time, only to start again with even more intensity, charging past the clots in its way.

  I later learned at Sunday School that jugs of serum periodically pouring from one’s vagina was no divine punishment at all, but a physiologically necessary and healthy part of a woman’s life that should not only be welcomed, but celebrated.

  Nonetheless, I prayed relentlessly that the God who had parted the Red Sea and dried it right up for the people He loved might consider blessing me with a season of dry panties.

  ❖

  I remember telling Ma that I wanted it taken out, cut away from me and incinerated in the large chamber at the hospital behind the hill.

  She said I was mad.

  “It is mad!” I screamed.

  “It’s not mad, Masechaba, it is just unwell.”

  “Well, I’m unwell because of it, Ma.”

  Ma said I was speaking nonsense, that these were the things women were to endure, and that if it was removed from me I would one day regret being unable to bring life into the world.

  Life?

  What did I care for bringing life into the world when I couldn’t have a life of my own? When I lived hostage to a beast in my pelvis that could split its head at any moment of its choosing, and angrily spill its contents onto the floor at any second of its liking without provocation?

  What life did I have? Did Ma not care about that?

  No, she did not.

  ❖

  I became a loner. Not because I wanted to be alone, but because it was easier for everyone that way. Tshiamo, my brother, was my only friend. The stains didn’t seem to bother him as much as they bothered others. Like when Papa bought him a car and he offered to take me for a spin. I was so excited to see Tshiamo excited, I forgot to run into the house and change my tampon and add a second layer to my pad. It was only when we got onto the highway, us foolish at 4:30 p.m. to enter the highway, that I saw the traffic and thought, crap. I tried not to think about it, even when I felt the stickiness between my thighs and knew that the tampon was engorged and the pad saturated and the only way out was through my jeans and onto Tshiamo’s new car seat. I tried hard to focus on the Tracy Chapman Tshiamo was singing along to. When we eventually got home, he pretended not to notice, but I knew he had, because I saw him through my bedroom window later with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge in his hand.

  ❖

  At school I always sat at the back of the class, making sure there was never anybody behind me, so that if I messed up my school dress, at least I wouldn’t be the last to know.

  I was clever and inquisitive at school, and I had no interest in hanging out with the troublemakers who marked out the last row of desks as their own. But I knew that if I was to maintain a seat for myself far from the suspicious eyes of the cruelest girls, I had to be as badass as the best of them.

  ❖

  You learn some tricks as you go. Dark clothing, ski pants under my school tunic, a cheap, thick, no-name brand pad under the Always Infinity to absorb the inevitable overflow. I was never without a tampon in my bra, so that if I had to dash to the bathroom in a crowd, I didn’t have to bend over and scrabble through my schoolbag first. Ballet? Forget it. Synchronized swimming? Are you crazy? Gymnastics? Not even if I was paid. Netball? Risky. Running? Sometimes.

  No parties. No sleepovers. Ma wanted none of the humiliation that would come with a phone call from another parent to advise that her daughter had bled through the sheets and onto the mattress. She pretended it didn’t bother her, but I knew she was just as embarrassed and perplexed by the aggression of her daughter’s young womb as everybody else was.

  She would say things like, “It’s because you eat too much cheese! That’s why you bleed the way you do,” or “Those tampons you use, they’re unnatural. They keep the dirt from coming out freely.”

  It made me angry when she said things like that, because she knew just as well as I did that those old wives’ tales were nonsense. No amount of cheese could explain my dysfunctional uterine bleeding and the accompanying dizziness, fainting spells, and galloping heartbeat that didn’t have much to gallop about. She knew that if it was as simple as letting the so-called “dirt” flow out freely, I’d be walking around with no pad or paper, not even a tanga or high-cuts, just bare for all the world to see, if that was what it would take to stop the madness that came from within.

  ❖

  I was always light-headed, always fainting, my heart always racing in my chest at high speed. In and out of the hospital I went, transfusion after transfusion, pill after pill, patch after patch, injection after injection.

  ❖

  Eventually the bleeding eased up, in fact almost stopped altogether, bar a little bit of spotting on the occasional month. I can’t remember how or the specific day. It may have been the endometrial ablation that finally did it. I was too young to understand, but I remember Ma telling Aunty Petunia that the doctors had said that short of a hysterectomy, the only thing that might work was to burn the lining of the womb.

  “Let them burn it, Ma!” I remember crying.

  She had shouted at me to be quiet. But I think after I fainted into Rakgadi Tebogo’s pool at Dineo’s traditional wedding, Ma stopped caring about the life I’d never be able to bring into the world and started worrying more about the life she’d brought into it.

  ❖

  But I didn’t trust, and continued to carry around pads, tampons, toilet paper, wipes, and black panties wherever I went. When clutch purses were in vogue, I watched enviously as pretty girls walked around the mall with a couple of notes and a lip gloss in the glittering pouches in their hands. But I knew better than to let my guard down. The beast was only sleeping, and could wake at any moment.

  So on job-shadow day, when I saw (through the narrow space between the oversized surgical cap, mask, and goggles they insisted I wear) a neurosurgeon climb onto the operating table and let his colleague release the pinched nerve from his back that had been troubling him all morning, I knew immediately that it was a message from God, and that it was in this very manner that I would get the abhorrent organ cut out of me and destroyed, once and for all.

  When Ma asked me later that evening how the day had gone, I told her it had been nothing short of marvelous, and that I was 120 percent sure that a medical doctor was what I wanted to be. She smiled when she heard me say that. It was a good profession, she said, and she had no doubt I’d make a great physician who would one day help a lot of people.

  I hadn’t thought about the people until she mentioned them. At that moment I decided it was unwise to tell her that I only wanted to become a doctor so I could make a friend at medical school who’d be willing to do the hysterectomy that all the doctors we’d seen so far had refused to perform.

  But that was all a very long time ago, and by the time the title was mine, these childish musings were all but forgotten.

  Why O Lord do you reject me and hide your face from me? From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death; I have suffered your terrors and am in despair. Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me. You have taken my companions and loved ones from me; the darkness is my closest friend.

  Psalm 88:14–18

  Father Joshua wasted no time after my graduation. Within weeks of my receiving my medical practitioner’s license from the Health Professionals Council of South Africa, he asked me to speak to the youth about careers. He said young people neede
d to be encouraged. Our people didn’t value education anymore, he lamented, and maybe if they saw someone like me doing well, they might be inspired.

  I told him I’d love to. But I was lying, of course. I hated public speaking, and I really didn’t have much to say. As far as I was concerned, if you’re clever, you become a doctor. Government contracts finish, and sometimes they don’t pay, and sometimes you get arrested. But if you study, it stays with you for life.

  Tshiamo painted pain, but it made him think too many deep thoughts, so he hanged himself on a tree. Papa got government contracts, but they reshuffled the cabinet and brought in people he didn’t know. There were irregularities that required a sacrificial lamb, so he was in the newspapers and is now with Gogo, in her back room, drinking the days that remain away. As for me, Ma found an admin job in government. She worked at the Department of Health so she could get me a bursary, which made it easy. There were not a million things I could choose from, anyhow. Seriti University was close to home, and Botshelo Hospital always needed intern doctors.

  But I couldn’t say no to Father Joshua. I couldn’t come across as too self-important to spend some time with the youth. So I wrote the stories I knew they wanted to hear, and emailed them to Tshiamo for his comments.

  Of course I didn’t expect a response. I’m not crazy. Nor was I ever in denial. But people mourn differently, and I was entitled to mourn whichever way I saw fit. The people at Gmail didn’t seem to mind. They kept on delivering my emails to Tshiamo just like they’d always done. Not like Ma, or Malome Softly, or Gogo and everyone else, who would have minded a lot and were nothing like they’d always been.

  Of course I knew Tshiamo was dead. There was no shortage of reminders. But what is knowing, anyway? I’ve known ever since I’ve had a thinking mind that I would one day die, but does that mean I wake up every morning preoccupied with it? Of course not. That would be absurd. I know Tshiamo’s dead, thank you very much. Thank you for being so concerned that I’m unaware of the worst thing that’s ever happened in my life. Thank you, you’re all so terribly kind. But can I choose to forget for just a moment? Would that be okay with you? Just like I choose to forget that the world is evil and our government corrupt and the West forever plotting our demise?