by Damon Galgut
Sometimes there was no sex. Sometimes it wasn’t what I was looking for. I just lay there with my face against her shoulder and one hand under her dress, on her breast. When this happened it was usually in silence, just the sound of breathing in the dark. But then once she did speak to me, a long soft monologue in her own language. I didn’t understand a word, but her voice sketched out a story on the inside of my eyelids, in which she and I were somewhere else.
So for a while I had two lives: one that was empty and adrift, in the hospital by day, and another that was illicit and intense, by the side of the road at night. The one had nothing to do with the other. For a long time she had no curiosity about who I was or what I did. And when she finally asked, I found myself telling a lie. I said I was an engineer for the government, here on contract for two years. I told her I was doing some work at the hospital at the moment, which was how I came to be driving the ambulance sometimes. I said I was living in a municipal flat in town, and that I had a wife in the city who often came up to visit me. I don’t know why I told these lies, except that I wanted to keep her away from my other, daytime life.
I needn’t have bothered. She never showed the slightest interest in uncovering the other side of me; the town itself seemed to exist for her on a different planet somewhere. Only once did I ever see her there. I was driving down the main street one afternoon and I spotted her on the pavement, walking alone. I pretended I hadn’t seen her and turned off at the next corner. She never mentioned it to me, and perhaps she hadn’t seen me either, but for two days afterwards I felt full of guilt and betrayal.
But I went back; I always went back. Every night that I wasn’t on duty, or when she hadn’t asked me not to come, I found myself on the road when it got dark, driving to her. And the shack, the weakest and flimsiest of structures, was always, permanently, there.
Then the thing between us began to seem like something solid too, something with foundations and dimensions, something real. And I became afraid of it. I told myself: this can’t go on, it must stop. I didn’t want something for which I felt obliged and responsible. I didn’t want something for which I might have to pay one day.
Then one night she asked me for money.
Everything changed in a moment.
It was a casual request, as I was leaving. I was getting dressed, tying up my shoelaces, and she said, ‘I have to ask favour.’
‘What’s that?’
But I knew. And I realized then that I’d been waiting for this since the very first night.
‘I’ve got big problem. My husband...’ She went into a long story about him, which I didn’t understand. Before she’d finished I said, ‘All right, how much do you need?’
‘I’m asking two hundred rand.’
‘All right.’
‘You give it?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is only for borrow.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘You can keep it.’
I said it carelessly. Both of us were talking in a careless, offhand way.
After that I gave her money from time to time. Sometimes she asked, sometimes I just gave. There was about these transactions a trace always of that first revelatory moment; we were travelling in a different landscape now. And it was only now that I felt how much of my life up there in the hospital had been based on what was happening in the shack. How much meaning had been generated there – though I understood none of it. The way that everything had been till then – the feeling of stupid innocence – was gone. I started to doubt everything. I had a lot of questions: that first night, when she’d told me to come back later, what was going on in her mind? All the times I’d come here, looking for comfort and relief, had she been looking for something else? Was money the motive all along?
And now I saw, I really saw, what was in front of me. The crude little dwelling, with its sand floor and its odd smells, wasn’t just an exotic backdrop to a nightly escape from my life: it was where she actually, permanently lived. She was very poor; she had nothing. The coins and notes that I stuffed into her hand on my way out of the door were a symbol of a separation between us that couldn’t be measured: it was a disjuncture between our very lives. Money couldn’t close the gap; it was the gap. We knew nothing about each other.
Now I couldn’t stop thinking. During the day I thought about that hour or two at night. There was no way any more to know what was true. I suspected everything she told me. Even whether she lived in the shack. Maybe she didn’t; maybe she went off somewhere else after I’d gone. I’d never spent the night to be sure. And her husband – did he actually exist? I had never seen him, only that white car outside, which could’ve belonged to anybody. And if he did exist – that shadowy, faceless man – did he know about me? Was he the one manipulating all these little events from a distance? All the lies I’d told, so small and harmless, were like confirmations that she was doing the same. It was so easy; why not? And then her sighs and broken English and explanations with her hands – it started to feel like dissembling and untruth. Maybe she could understand me perfectly when I talked. Oh, there was an element of craziness to my thinking, I knew that. But my suspicion and mistrust were boundless; as big, in fact, as my own dishonesty.
I started going there in the daytime. I told myself it was the proper thing to do: to see her in a normal way, when the sun was up. But I was trying to spy on her life, to find out who she was. I didn’t find anything out. I sat there on the wooden crate, often for long stretches of silence. Other people were always passing through. There were travellers or tourists going over the border or to the game farms near by, and they would stop and look over the shelves and sometimes buy something. And there was a woman who came from the village behind the shack, bringing food or tea in chipped enamel plates and mugs; the first time she saw me she went away quickly, looking scared, but Maria must have spoken to her, because after that she would always sit for a while, smiling shyly and watching me. But she could speak no English at all.
And then somehow it was finished. As with my marriage, there was no clear climactic moment; it was more like something inevitable in the situation and in us, which over time worked its way into events. My weird romance that belonged to night and silence had become an ordinary daytime affair, as real as my life.
So I stopped going. Maybe not overnight, but gradually. I went only once a week, then every fortnight, and then a month went past. And suddenly it was all behind me. I drove by from time to time without stopping, just to make sure the shack was still there. Once the white car was parked outside and I had my first true, genuine pang of jealousy. But I didn’t go back. I told myself that I would do it one day. I would just let a little time pass, a few months, to wipe out what had gone wrong. And then I would go back in the old way, at night, without too much talking. And it would be like it was when we’d started. But the little while turned into a long stretch of time – a year, a year and a half, more. And I knew then that I would never go back.
Until the day I went past with Laurence Waters, and it was all somehow different, and one thing led to another.
4
The morning after Laurence arrived, Dr Ngema asked me to come to her office to talk. We sat in the low chairs in front of her desk, a sign that we were going to have an informal, personal chat.
Dr Ngema was in her early sixties, a dry dusty bird of a woman with a serious face. It was a measure of the relationship between us that, although we called each other by our first names in conversation, I still thought of her in my mind as Dr Ngema. She was the head of the hospital, my employer and superior, but a complex bit of history made me heir to the throne, and the politics between us were difficult and fragile.
When I first came up to the hospital it was to take over from Dr Ngema. The post had been advertised at a critical juncture in my life. My marriage had collapsed, I couldn’t continue my practice, and I wanted everything to change. A move up here seemed like the opportunity I was looking for. And for a while it was al
l set to fall into place.
Dr Ngema was moving to a new position in the Department of Health, down in the city. She’d been working at the hospital for ten or eleven years, after spending most of her life overseas in exile. She didn’t want to be stranded out here, on the edge of things, but for her it was a way of treading water, just for a while, till she could move closer to the centre. Now her moment had come. She had only to fill her position behind her, and I was her choice. There were – I discovered afterwards – only three other applicants. But the selection committee consisted solely of Dr Ngema, and she saw in me whatever it was she was looking for.
So it had all seemed good for a while. I made my move up here a month early, to learn the ropes from her. But a week or two after I arrived, the post, whatever it was that she’d been aiming for, became suddenly unavailable again. Something had shifted somewhere. And my new job was suddenly unavailable too.
I could have left. I was offered a payout and an apology, and I could have retreated to the shambles of my old life. But I decided to stay. According to Dr Ngema, it was only a matter of time before the post she wanted would open up again, and of course if I was working here I would still be first in line. I didn’t believe her, but I chose to believe her. It wouldn’t be for long, I told myself – a year or two, and then I would reconsider my future.
But the year or two had become six or seven, and I still hadn’t moved. From time to time there had been further rumours, little bursts of excitement from Dr Ngema: it was happening at last, the job was about to be offered; but these flurries always subsided again into resignation and disappointment. It wasn’t her fault, but all of this pulling and pushing had made even the most innocuous conversation between us feel charged and significant.
Today she wanted to talk about Laurence. What he’d done yesterday – showing her up in front of me with the appendix patient – had upset her. She wanted him out, but of course she wouldn’t say it like that.
‘I have a feeling he was looking for a different kind of hospital,’ she said. ‘The set-up here – it’s too low-key for someone like him.’
‘I agree,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you take him around, Frank? Show him the whole place. Let him see what he’s in for. Then if he wants to be transferred somewhere else, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘All right. No problem.’
‘Of course he’s welcome here. I’m not saying he isn’t. The community service idea – I’m in favour. I’m all for innovation and change, you know that.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’
Innovation and change: it was one of her key phrases, a mantra she liked to repeat. But it was empty. Ruth Ngema would go to great lengths to avoid any innovation or change, because who knew what might follow on? But I was in tune with her today, I knew what she wanted, and she understood my feelings too.
‘And if he goes, you can have your room back to yourself,’ she said. ‘It just seems easier for everybody.’
So I showed Laurence around. It was strange being a guide. I had been there so long that I looked at things without seeing them. But now it all came into focus, as if it was my first day. I walked him through the hospital. The life and activity of the place was all at one end of the main building; there was no need to go further. Doors led into deserted wards, rows of beds standing spectral and naked between green curtains hanging on rails. Upstairs were the offices. Dr Ngema occupied the first one, directly above the front entrance. We saw her at her desk as we passed, head bowed over papers, pen scratching; she looked up and smiled knowingly as we went by. Then one empty cubicle after another, bare even of the simplest furniture. All these rooms, waiting to receive people and industry and labour that had just never come.
Although the hospital was nearly ten years old by now, it had never been properly completed. Too many things had intervened. It had started as the project of the first chief minister of the homeland, but as soon as all the buildings had gone up there was the military coup and everything had been stalled and suspended. It took another two years for all of it to get moving again. But not long after that the white government finally gave in, down in the real centre of power, far away, and it was all left hanging again. Then the homeland had ceased to be a homeland, and with its reabsorption into the country the meaning and the future of the hospital became permanently unclear.
So it was a strange twilight place, halfway between nothing and somewhere. The little jumble of disconnected buildings, like all the structures in the town, was slowly falling into ruin. Grass had started growing on the roof. The pink walls – nobody knew why it had all been painted pink – had faded with the weather into a pale shade of orange. The grounds behind their high wall and gate were going to seed. At night most of the windows, regularly repeated behind bars, were dark.
For the few of us still remaining, life went on between twin poles of banality and violence. There were long periods of tedium when nothing happened, the place was empty. Then suddenly there would be a flurry, somebody arriving in the middle of the night, injured, bleeding. And we would try to do something to help. But the truth is that we were very limited in what we could do. We were low on equipment and supplies and money. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that certain things were unavailable, while others were stacked up in the cupboards. We had large supplies of certain drugs we rarely used, while deliveries of vital medicines were frozen because of some massive unpaid bill higher up in the system somewhere. Condoms, for example: we had shelf after shelf of them, we didn’t know what to do with them, while basics like swabs, sterile gloves and X-ray paper were on perpetual order, but never came. We had an electronic ventilator and one or two other pieces of critical-care equipment, but there were frequent power cuts and we couldn’t get the provincial government to repair our faulty emergency generator. It was not unknown for operations to happen on critically injured patients by torchlight.
In the other building, where we slept, the conditions were very bad. At the far end of the passage was a door that led into a wing that had been planned as an extension of the main building. There were more wards here, more offices; it was a mirror image, really, of the main wing. But it had been plundered. There were one or two metal bed-frames left, and here and there a tattered curtain hanging down. Everything else that was usable had been stripped. In the bathroom the sinks had been pulled out of the wall, the metal heads of the showers removed. Pipes dangled into empty air. In one or two rooms the windows had been broken and birds had come in to nest. The burbling of doves echoed weirdly in the stillness and white stars of shit were splattered on the floor.
Both of us went silent as we paced through this neglect and slow decay. When we got to the other end where the entrance, all boarded up and barred, was supposed to lead out into the parking lot, we stopped. There was a window looking out on the overgrown plot of land between us and the main building. The shadows of leaves moved on our faces.
‘I suppose it’s not what you expected,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘You don’t have to stay. If you asked for a transfer, I’m sure Dr Ngema —’
‘Oh,’ he said, surprised. ‘But I want to stay.’
I looked at him. With my new eyes I saw him properly for the first time. He was long and tall and thin. Under a fringe of blond hair, his face was flat and open. It was a plain face, ordinary, except for the quality I had seen in the first glance, laid over it like a second skin. This quality made his face somehow remarkable, but I couldn’t give it a name.
‘Why did you come here?’ I said.
‘But you know why.’
‘I mean, why here? You asked to come to this hospital. You specially requested it. Why?’
He took his spectacles off and rubbed them on his sleeve. His grey eyes blinked dimly as he looked out of the window. ‘I heard it was a tiny place,’ he said. ‘I heard there were a lot of problems.’
‘I don’t understand. Surely those are logical reasons not
to be here. Why would you want to do this to yourself?’
He didn’t want to get into that. He put on his glasses and pointed away, out of the window, above the trees, to the highest hill at the edge of town. ‘Look! What’s that?’
‘That used to be the Brigadier’s house.’
‘Who’s the Brigadier?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Ja. Should I know? Did he do something famous?’
‘He overthrew the homeland government in a military coup.’
But the interest had switched off in his face; he was looking around him, frowning again.
‘All this,’ he said. ‘Will it just go to waste? What’s being done with it? Will it just stand here?’
‘It’ll be picked to pieces, if you ask me. It’s being stripped and stolen. Look. You can see.’
‘But that’s terrible. Who’s doing it?’
I shrugged. ‘Anybody can get in. The door’s not locked.’
It didn’t seem that important to me, but he was transfixed by a real dismay. I could see him noticing all the bare, exposed places in the filthy passage: the missing skirting boards, the ripped-out light fittings, the raw dangling wires. He shook his head. ‘What for? Where does it go?’
‘There are lots of poor people out there. They can use anything.’
‘But it’s for them. The hospital. It’s for them!’
‘You go and tell them that.’
I thought he might burst into tears. His expression was locked on a quandary that he just couldn’t resolve. I put a hand on his shoulder and said: ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s too depressing.’
‘Why doesn’t anybody do something?’
‘But what should they do?’
We walked back through the strange mausoleum, leaving the prints of our feet in the dust. Pigeons flurried up at our approach. Outside, blinking in the hot sun, I said, ‘That’s it. That’s the hospital.’