The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  When I declared my intention to become a doctor, my father never suspected that it was Carmine’s voice that had pushed me down this path, and, my older brothers having already fulfilled their purpose by entering finance, law and government, I was given apathetic permission to follow this less than ideal career.

  Carmine kept me going through my years of inadequacy and doubt at university. She had raised me where my mother had not, then carried me to manhood while my father fussed with his papers and ink.

  I loved her more than I ever loved the woman I thought I had fancied and for whose affections I had been banished to Natal.

  And whatever you love the most is the thing the shadow kills. That is the first lesson of the curse that was laid upon me.

  Chapter 11

  How does the mind begin to approach the impossible?

  For the days after Langa was murdered at the boab tree, I looked upon the memory of his shadow as a tormented dream, a sign that my own conscience was at last, too late, stirred to action. I went to church and managed to pray a little. I was diligent in the care of my patients, and spoke long and earnestly with the pastor, a malarial man by the name of Kent, as to how a good man might make a difference.

  He knew what I was truly asking, and where my conscience lay, but was disinclined to offer the forgiveness I desired, and instead spoke of kindness to our neighbours and Christianity towards all men. He clearly intended that I should go into the places where the black men lived and try to practise some sort of evangelism, but all I saw in my dreams were the eyes of Langa’s mother upon me, and waking I would immediately find something more important to do among the cowering, barking, killing whites of the town.

  Then my father’s telegram came, and of course I connected Carmine’s death to the moment of my dream; and at once dismissed it as self-pitying foolery. I went through sheets of paper trying to compose a reply, and in the end could only manage something as brisk as he himself had achieved.

  Message received STOP God rest STOP

  Nothing else I could say to the old man seemed to have any meaning.

  For a while I mourned, and found that I didn’t think about Isabella, the woman I had tried to love in London. I would never have compared Carmine and Isabella before; it would never have occurred to me to line up their qualities side by side, but now that Carmine was so high in my thoughts, I could not help but notice how profoundly more whole she was in my recollection than Isabella, who flitted from one thing to another, never quite pinned down to anything more than a half-fantasy of a woman I had half aspired to love.

  And so the time passed.

  Sometimes it passed in isolation. My own people were murderers, that much was clear even to me; yet it seemed impossible that the Bantu people might ever forgive us for our cruelties and oppression, and so I soon slipped into the habits of nearly all white men in that place, and in my shame and insecurity shunned black men.

  Sometimes I found company. Whenever Kent’s malarial fever brought him low, I would sit by his bedside and read him psalms until I discovered that he found them as boring as I did, at which point I’d read the newspaper, four or five days out of date but still full of salacious tittle-tattle of cattle thefts, indiscretions, rows in the Cape, fabled impis sighted, riches discovered and constant rumblings along the border.

  At the brothel, I was called to a woman who had hidden her pregnancy for months beneath tight bandages, and who now was in labour weeks before she should have been. The white midwife would not come, and the sangoma was too far away to reach in haste, so as a final, depressing last resort they summoned me, and the child came out, tiny, silent, a sparrow of weight in my hands. I scrubbed and cleaned it and rubbed its chest and waved smelling salts beneath its nose and was ready to pronounce the tiny thing dead when at last it screamed. It screamed, and for the first time in I knew not how long there were tears in my eyes and I knew perfectly well that it was nothing I had done that had saved this creature’s life, and it was still most likely to die, and I handed the child to his mother, who, exhausted and bleeding, was too tired to pretend that she was anything less than human, and whose world burst apart in that moment with a love supreme.

  A few moments later the sangoma arrived, breathless from his summons, and at once I was bundled from the room, covered in fluids and the stink of childbirth, so that he might perform those prayers and rituals for the child’s well-being that were most necessary. My eyes met the mother’s for only a moment, and I thought she mouthed something at me between her tears, and I didn’t know what it was, and had never learnt her name, for why should she share it with me, and why would I ever ask?

  It was at this moment perhaps, standing stinking and sodden in the dark, flies lapping at the drying blood and fluids that coated my sleeves and waistcoat, that I began to think about visiting the witch doctors of the veld.

  It was Thozoma, the Knofiuses’ housekeeper, who set me on the path.

  Every day she and her husband, Khwezi, were silent presences around the Knofius house and stables. In his starched white shirt and stiffly creased brown trousers, Khwezi was the epitome of the stern, dedicated hand, tender to his horses and iron to all others; while in her blue frock and little white apron, Thozoma cooked, scrubbed and prayed like a Christian woman of Kensington.

  But at night, when the lamps were turned down, they sometimes stood together before the stars, and once a month they would leave for a day to go even Mrs Knofius wasn’t sure where, and when they returned they were quieter still, and there was that which glowed within their eyes that whispered of secrets untold.

  When Thozoma came down with a fever, she was put to bed and Mrs Knofius served her disgusting soups with vile mashed vegetables in them, a terrible falling-off from Thozoma’s own excellent cooking. When the disease worsened, and pus began to seep from her red eyes, I presented myself with my medical wisdom, and was indeed able to announce that yes, she had an eye infection, and to wash her eyes regularly with lightly salted water. This was the limit of my medical prowess: superb diagnosis, with very little in the way of remedy. Many is the doctor who takes great satisfaction in proclaiming, “Why yes, you have yellow fever and are like to die!” before turning away, incredibly pleased at their science for having diagnosed the disease, and utterly powerless before it.

  When, after a week, Thozoma’s condition was barely improving, her husband took her to the sangoma. I was so outraged by this that I asked the Knofiuses to keep their servant at home; but they would not interfere, save, at my insistence, to permit me to travel with them. Khwezi was dismayed, but what could he do against his master’s command? Nothing that would not endanger him; nothing but agree.

  The first sangoma I met that day covered Thozoma in pigments and fats, chanted and danced, drummed, burnt something that stung my eyes, and sent her home with a slap on her shoulder, and lo, when two weeks later she was recovering well, as is often the course of any disease that does not kill you, she smiled meekly and murmured, “It was the sangoma.”

  I blustered and flustered and said that was an outrageous suggestion, and, determined in some manner to prove the point, demanded to meet more of these quacks and vagrants to truly show how meagre their craft was next to mine. Reluctantly, ordered to it, Thozoma became my chaperone.

  One woman, sitting on a reed mat with legs folded, barely interested in glancing at the mewling, diseased baby laid before her, threw a handful of bones upon the floor, poked and muttered at their alignment and finally, with a wave of her hand, dismissed the babe without having done anything more, and the family bobbed in tearful gratitude and swept their child away to whatever fate awaited it.

  Another, a man with scars popping across his face, arms and hands, pranced and swung around a boy held in chains, chanting and screaming, dealing the boy such whacks across his back, buttocks and legs that I feared he’d break him. The child writhed and foamed and howled on the ground, but did not resist the treatment.

  An old fellow with hair pai
nted in white coils exclaimed briskly, “Bend over!” and before the crowd of six or seven onlookers applied an enema with the care of a riveter hammering home a bolt.

  I saw men and women cut with knives on which there were poisonous and curative concoctions; an old man drink a bucket, and then another, of some stinking herbal sort, and then retch and shudder as he puked it all up again before declaring that he was better, cured!

  I saw a mother crying, sobbing into the sangoma’s arms as she held her and whispered that it would be all right.

  I heard spells intoned in a language I didn’t understand, clicks and clatters of rattling speech, and I will confess there were times when I saw the sangoma do little more than I might have done, suggesting heat for a pain, cool water for a burn, and one who popped a dislocated patella back over the knee with a single swing of a wooden club, which, though there had been some preamble about said club’s sacred history, nevertheless did the job as well as any London doctor could.

  “What did she say at the end?” I asked Thozoma as we rattled on the cart down the dusty road to home.

  “She said to walk regularly, and breathe clean air.”

  I found Ndiliwisa the day she was initiated. My presence was fretfully tolerated at the ceremony as it had been at all the huts I had attended, but here more than elsewhere I found myself pressed back by a cordon of men, who, though they never threatened me, would not permit me to go too close to the dancing woman.

  Tall and thin, with a round face descending to a sharp point and wide eyes framing a short nose, she had been called to heal after a period of long illness in which she had experienced many convulsions and visions. These were seen as a sign of her destiny, and to refuse it was to anger the spirits; so on a spring evening in August, the stifling heat of the day beginning to blow away in the wind off the mountains, Ndiliwisa danced and drummed her way to enlightenment, bare feet pounding the baked dust, arms encased in beads of white and red, a collar of leopard skin at her throat. She lay on her back and her knees kicked at the sky, her feet tore and stretched at the ground, her fingers clawed, her eyes boggled and her tongue lolled as she had a seizure of such force and duration that, had we been in London, I would have ordered her dosed with bromine on the spot.

  At last, panting, soaked in sweat, spit on her face and urine between her legs, she slowed, drew down, succumbed, head turned to one side on the dusty earth. Her wide eyes looked without seeing, spun across the assembled viewers, once, twice, closed, opened, looked again and at last fell on me.

  Here they stayed, and though the whites of her eyes were so wide that surely her face must hurt with the force of it, and though her tongue still lolled loosely between her panting lips, I knew she saw me, and saw through me, and saw the truth of me.

  She began to speak, a language I didn’t know. As she did, people stirred uneasily, glanced at me. A few men moved a little away from me as her voice rose; a muttering began, tutting, shaking of heads. I was in danger, I knew this now, heard the threats of the Englishman at once start to my lips in their usual terror – the guns, the fire, the retribution that would fall if any harm came to me. Some thin morsel of common sense held me back, for surely this little patch of earth would burn if I vanished in it, but I would still be dead, my body dismembered to be fed to laughing hyenas or the vultures that swooped down from the mountain.

  Now some people were shoving, pushing me back, and still Ndiliwisa shrieked her accusations at my face, one shaking finger rising from the earth, her body buckling up as if pulled by strings threaded through belly and hips, a puppet tortured by her maker. Someone spat at my feet; another shoved me hard enough that I lost my balance, falling onto my backside, and now scrambling back in the dust, I felt tiny beneath a wall of openly hostile, angry faces. I rolled onto my hands and knees, then ran. Englishmen didn’t run from black men, from cowed children grateful for our civilisation. They only ran from cannibals and savages.

  I ran, and knew in my heart that I was wrong about everything that could possibly matter.

  It took me a week to muster the courage to go back.

  I enlisted Thozoma as my translator, and secretly packed a gun borrowed from Mr Smid in my doctor’s bag. Together we wove through the mud streets on the edge of town, open sewers down the middle and men huddled in the shadows turning to stare as we passed, bare chests and bare feet, laughter from a place where a fire burnt; a voice raised in anger; an old woman dressed in folds of endless brown cloth despite the blazing summer heat, children running by a tiny grey stream.

  We found Ndiliwisa in her mother’s hut, grinding some sort of reddish root in a hollow stone bowl. She glanced up as we approached, and seemed to recognise me, and wasn’t surprised.

  Thozoma rattled off polite greetings, respect, a hope that we didn’t intrude, an offer to pay for her services.

  The sangoma replied briskly, not looking up from her grinding, and a short conversation ensued between the women. Speaking her own tongue, Thozoma had nothing of the breathy softness I associated with her English. She was a matron, bartering with an intransigent who would be cowed before her. She was master of her own home, her own world. These truths were all apparent in her native voice, and vanished immediately when she slipped back to English to translate for me.

  “The sangoma says she will not take your money. She says you are cursed, Dr Abbey.”

  “What does she mean, cursed?”

  Another conversation. Now Ndiliwisa talked more, still not looking in my direction, and Thozoma nodded and occasionally cut in with another question, and I waited, the sweat running down my back and sides, aware of eyes all around and the gun in my bag.

  At last, with a meek bowing of her head: “Dr Abbey, the sangoma says that you have the truth-speaker’s curse on you. She says that there is a ldozl that follows you, and it will not rest until it has killed those you love.”

  A rush of blood in my head, a sudden swell of darkness before my eyes. I leant against the hard wall of the hut, and breathed deeply of its strange odours, of the foul herbs and roots that Ndiliwisa ground, her rhythm never breaking. The ice of it hit me as hard as if the shadow had been on top of me, as if I could see it in the corner of my eye. Thozoma watched me, and did not move to help me as I swayed, but asked softly, cautious, “Are you well, Dr Abbey?”

  “How do I get rid of it? How do I get rid of the curse?”

  Question: answer. Conversation, enquiry. I was an alien in a strange land, unable to speak these people’s language. I was a mute, helpless child. I should not have come here.

  “She says that there are some who know how to lift the curse. She says with some it is given as a blessing.” A clarification from Ndiliwisa, a hasty addendum lest Thozoma miss a vital point. “But with you,” she added, “it is a curse.”

  “If she can see it, can she get rid of it?”

  More conversation. Now when Thozoma answered she would not meet my eye.

  “Dr Abbey, she says that even if she could, she would not. If you are followed by the shadow of one who died, it is because you have called to the darkness. It is not her place to interfere in such things. It would not be pleasing to the spirits.”

  Desperation now, overwhelming all else.

  Can she do it?

  Will she do it?

  I can pay, I can pay anything.

  Damn you I can pay I’m a doctor I’m British I can do this you will do this, you must do this, are you listening to me you bitch, are you listening to me?

  She was not.

  She ground her herbs, and Thozoma stood quietly by and did not look me in the eye as she intoned my words, and when I bent down low to strike the witch, one hand raised, I heard Thozoma catch her breath, and Ndiliwisa did not look up at me, though my shadow hunched over her, and I knew I was a monster, and I knew I was damned.

  We rode home in silence, Thozoma and I, sitting together at the front of the Knofiuses’ small horse and cart.

  Only once did Thozoma speak, as we drew
close to the house.

  “Dr Abbey,” she murmured, “you should leave this place soon, before you fall in love.”

  I didn’t ask for an explanation, and she never again looked me in the eye.

  Chapter 12

  He comes. He comes, he comes, he comes.

  Langa always comes back to me.

  He travels at an injured boy’s shuffle, limping across the earth. He walks through walls, climbs a mountain at the same pace as he descends, does not slow for sea or desert.

  He comes.

  Once, when the years had rolled by, I returned to the Cape to try and find his mother. Her name was Sibongile, and she had borne four children and lost three, two to disease, one to the fire. I rode for weeks in a widening spiral around Kimberley, through a land torn by conflict. The British and the Boers had gone back to war, as had been inevitable, and in the camps, the starved faces of the white women and children peered out from between fire fences; while in the veld, the black men and women died without marker for their graves or counting of their blood, lost to the white men who would later write the histories. I found a woman who thought she knew Sibongile, but she lied. Then I found a man who said he was her brother, and the truth was on me and I knew he believed that of which he spoke, but he also believed he was a king, and that the moon watched him, and he had seen some sights that broke his seeing for ever, and people laughed at him and he dared not dream when he closed his eyes.

  At last I found Sibongile’s surviving daughter, Mbalenhle. She lived in a kraal far from the fighting, the third wife of a man who puffed himself up as great, and beat his children to prove that he was, because he was not. She was safe, and knew me at once upon my coming to her hearth, and fed me as was the correct way of things, and spoke some English, and sat knees drawn to her chest and listened patiently as I tried to explain myself.