by Lucie Wilk
Earlier today Jakob saw a man at the market. He was walking along the other side of the road from where Jakob sat with his cousins, selling their carvings. Jakob was kneeling beside some Chief’s Chairs, rich mahogany slabs of carved wood that fit together to make a low and impractical seat that tourists love. The crowd shifted between them and for a moment he lost sight of the man across the road. His cousin beside him said: “He’s not a tourist. He’s one of the new doctors at the hospital.” Jakob watched the man as he dodged the crowd, his head tucked down, his neck flushed and damp, his mouth wide and flat.
“Look at his hair,” he said.
“Like a tomato.”
“Brighter than that. Like some kind of metal. Or fire.” How could you describe that hair? Brassy and loud as the marching band he’d seen once celebrating some other people’s victory.
“Maybe he has feathers on his head.” His cousin laughed and resumed his carving, chipping away chunks of wood with delicate taps on the chisel. “Anyway, there’s no point bothering with him. These doctors only buy when they’re about to leave.”
Jakob watched the doctor make his way down the lane and eventually he and his red hair disappeared from view.
Now, looking at his mother’s leg, Jakob thinks of this doctor. This is the type of man who should be looking after his mother. This is the type of man—he is sure of it—who could save her. A man like that.
“We should go to the hospital,” he says.
He has said it before and each time she always shook her head and replied: “They will take it. They will take off my foot like they took out my womb.” Then she would go to where her money was stored, pull out a few kwacha, and instruct him to go to their local sing’anga, a secretive and strange man who lives alone and prefers to keep himself and his home in shadows. Also, he has a reputation for being dishonest. Jakob hated handing the money over to him which he took quickly and with dirty fingers, throwing back at Jakob a bundle of herbs. “Boil them in water. Put them on the foot.” Then he’d turn away, light up a cigarette, tuck Jakob’s mother’s money into a pocket of his silty grey trousers.
And now, when his mother does not reply, he says it again. He thinks of the doctor in the market and says it again. If necessary, he will remind her that their savings, gathered kwacha by kwacha from years of his father’s work in the tea fields, are gone. Into the pockets of the sing’anga. They have nothing left to spend. But he does not have to remind her because this time his mother nods.
Jakob has seen the hospital from the outside, but has never ventured inside. Except, of course, when he was carried in and out as a newborn. Even the doors are huge, much bigger than they need to be. They force him to stagger to pull them open. Perhaps this is the test: if you haven’t enough strength to move the doors, then you shouldn’t bother coming in at all. But Jakob manages to get one of them open and holds it open for his mother whose grip on him is weakening. Together, they struggle into the dim entranceway.
A man at a kiosk in the foyer glances up at them and then gestures wordlessly, points to somewhere further into the building. They make their way down the corridor. Having now entered this place, Jakob understands why his mother did not want to come back here. The size of the entrance is bigger than the church, bigger than the entire marketplace near their home. And then there are the people in smart uniforms who bustle past them. And the endless branching corridors and gaping rooms they pass filled with beds. Filled with bodies. Everything here seems important. This place feels bigger, more powerful, and capable of more miracles than the Church of St. Michael and All Angels which they attend every Sunday.
The long journey to get here—almost a full day’s walk from the outskirts of town—has taken its toll. His mother struggles to walk now, and leans heavily against him, eyes closed. Her cheekbones seem to have grown sharper just over the day. She breathes quickly through her mouth.
They are waved on to three different kiosks at the ends of three different corridors before a nurse, after looking at them grimly from the other side of her desk, finally rises from her chair, comes round to where they stand and fastens a plastic band on his mother’s wrist with something scribbled on it in pen. His mother’s name. Jakob recognizes some of the letters, symbols he had learned once, years ago, before he stopped attending school. The nurse is wrapping something around the upper part of his mother’s arm. It puffs up and then wheezes out air. She scribbles something on a piece of paper. She tells Jakob to take his mother to the end of the corridor, where there should be a place to sit on the floor. Jakob rouses his mother and they make their way down the corridor, choose the next empty space, sit down and wait.
*
There have been no miracles in the time they’ve been here at the hospital. Not for Jakob’s mother, nor for any of the other men, women and children who line its corridors, fill its beds and floors. Jakob had not expected anything; he does not know what it is to have an expectation, to feel that something good must happen. But he does know hope, and he’d hung a lot of it over the doorway of this place, even before his mother became ill. Maybe because he knew the hospital had saved his mother when he was a baby, thus rescuing him from the responsibility of her death so soon after she gave him life. Maybe it was the influence of the strong and powerful who created this place, who named it after their queen. Perhaps it was the name itself: The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, as if it were guarded by royalty. Over the years as he grew up, every time he passed the building, or glimpsed it through the trees up on the hill, he had felt a stirring of hope, like it safeguarded the chance of a better future within its walls.
But since arriving here, the future has taken on the long, narrow and dark dimensions of the corridors in this place. The doctor—Kumwembe is his name—knelt down and studied his mother’s foot the first day. He tsked as he held the heel and ignored her wincing as he turned and lifted it so he could see the wound in the light that came through the window above them. A nurse had then come to tunnel a tube beneath the skin of his mother’s arm, and a bag of clear, clean water now hangs above them, slowly emptying into her. When she has to go to the toilet, Jakob takes care to move the pole alongside her and he guards the lengths of tubing to not disturb the flow of the water. But each time the doctor checked her foot he tsked again, shook his head, muttered under his breath that it was not responding, not responding. It was then that they met Dr. Ellison.
The big, white doctor filled the hallway. He bent his head slightly and Jakob could see where the thin yellow hairs sprouted from his shiny red scalp. This is a surgeon. A man who uses knives to cure and Jakob couldn’t help feel his mother’s fear of his knife, where it might land. After looking at Jakob’s mother’s foot from his great height, he squatted down and pointed his red, thick finger at her lower leg, above the wound. He traced a line across the leg with his finger. His nail left a white line in her scaly skin. “Right here,” he said as he traced. “Okay?”
Jakob watched his mother when the doctor touched her leg, but her eyes were closed. He wondered if she’d understood. When he told her in Chichewa that she would indeed lose her foot, she just nodded, eyes still closed. He’d looked up at Dr. Ellison and nodded. “Yes, okay,” he heard himself say.
He hoped his mother hadn’t heard him speak.
It wasn’t very long after he said those words—yes, okay—that they came to take his mother away. They brought a gurney for her. He helped her up onto it from where she had spent so many days slumped against the wall in the hallway; they had never made it into a ward. But now she would earn a place on a bed and the price of admission was her foot. She lay on the gurney and opened her eyes once to look up at the ceiling before closing them again. His mother had spent most of her hours in the hospital—awake or asleep—with her eyes closed. Jakob squeezed her hand once and whispered, “God willing, you will be safe, Mama,” before they wheeled her away.
When Jakob’s mother is returned
from the surgical suites, he follows her squeaking gurney down the hall to a new room—one of the expansive rooms that she will occupy with a sea of others who have shared a taste of the surgeon’s knife. She is groggy. A thin sheet is draped over her and Jakob can see where her right leg ends too soon, lacking the tented rise of a foot beyond it. It looks just like he had feared it would.
His mother finds his face with eyes that are cloudy and confused. “My foot,” she says to him.
“Yes, Mama.”
“Is it safe?”
He hesitates only briefly. “Yes, Mama.”
He wonders if she had asked this of the doctors when she lost her womb. A womb is easier to lie about, hidden as it is inside the body. He squeezes her hand and watches her drift off again.
*
Jakob’s mother has TB. It is in the lungs. This was the reason for the cough she’d had for as long as he could remember. It had been living in her foot, too. He is going to be checked for it and they will both need treatment. They will both need to stay here for a long time.
Dr. Kumwembe explains this to them in Chichewa so his mother can understand, too. The only English word he uses is TB. He lifts his arm and points down the long corridor.
“The TB ward is that way,” he says. “Down the main corridor, left at the junction, at the end of that corridor. You’ll see the sign.” He assumes that Jakob can read. This flatters Jakob and he wishes he could show the doctor that his assumption is right. He is determined not to get lost on the way to the TB ward.
As he leads his mother down the hallway to the ward, pushing her in the wheelchair a nurse found for them, Jakob thinks of his aunties and cousins and friends back home. The two of them have been in the hospital for many days, and now they will be here much longer. The treatment requires taking medicine every day for many months. He pushes his mother easily up the slope of the corridor. She is very light and pushing her takes no effort at all.
He nods to a group of orderlies who loiter at one end of the hall. They wave back. There are familiar faces as he moves down the corridor, now. There are smiles, nods, knowing looks. He is not sure if this lightness has always been here, or whether the cloud has only recently lifted. But gradually he is starting to recognize within the wards and halls what he’d felt when he viewed the hospital from the outside: that feeling of something better.
He sees the letters on the sign and knows them right away: TB. So this will be their new home. He pushes his mother’s chair into the ward.
Chapter 3
The sky opens up above Henry as he heads down the road, away from the hospital and the trees that surround it. He walks everywhere right now—he doesn’t own a vehicle, although he knows he will need one. He will need it for outreach work, and he won’t be able to afford the time it will take to get to these places by public transport—days upon days.
Now that his rounds are done, he is not sure if he did them quickly or slowly, whether it is morning or afternoon. Time is beginning to lose relevance, but Henry clings to it nonetheless. All his life, he has treated time as a commodity and over the years it has taken on an exact monetary value. And thus, he has spent time frugally, dispensing each hour carefully, filling it with activities, making the most of it. He abhors waste, time included.
He continues down the hill to the Blantyre downtown market. Trucks and minivans rattle past; passengers hang off the backs and sides of the vehicles, fan out in layers—an odd but somehow graceful spray of human petals. He ignores the people he passes on the path—their long looks and attempts at eye contact—he has grown tired of being a curiosity, of trying to be polite, of answering the searching questions. He turns off the main road and onto a narrow laneway, moving through the throng of people who gather in the marketplace to peruse, shop, steal, socialize, and loiter. It is the loiterers who know him best. The men who lean against buildings, arms and legs crossed, caps pulled down over their eyes. Theirs are the faces which follow him, barely perceptible nods of recognition as he passes by. They know his routine, he knows theirs.
The shopkeepers know him, too. Henry walks over to a stand piled high with fruit: bananas, plantains, tangerines, and overripe, bruised tomatoes adorned with flies. The shopkeeper moves closer to Henry. “Doctor.” He points to a pyramid of tangerines. “Good.”
Henry is increasingly being addressed this way, although he has never introduced himself outside of the hospital. He nods back, smiles. He picks up two tangerines and hands over a few kwacha. He waves back the change and the shopkeeper grins and nods.
Henry pockets the fruit and weaves his way through the narrow rows of wooden stands, walks in the yellowed shade of the corrugated plastic awnings. Here in the market, Henry feels the push of the crowd, feels Blantyre as the second largest city in the country and home to some 700,000 Malawians. Elsewhere the population scatters and disappears into the low-lying buildings that spread out from the small city core. He passes a stand displaying medication. Pills of various shapes, colours and sizes are bagged and organized in some way, unlabelled. Probably knock-offs, created in a basement warehouse somewhere in the anonymity of the city.
The pill culture. Salvation in a bottle. No longer a wing and a prayer, it is a pill and a promise. Just a few generations beyond the travelling salesman touting miracle tonic, he plies pills for a living and is charged with fixing all human ailments armed with a stethoscope and a prescription pad.
There was a time when his position, this ambassadorship, was a source of pride. A badge of honour.
Music plays from a nearby radio, reggae with choppy cuts of static.
A woman with a big-eyed child on her back and three more straggling behind her has approached the stand. The children gape at Henry. Their mother touches her stomach delicately.
“Bilharzia.”
The pill vendor reaches for a bag of orange tablets. The woman takes them then rummages in her wrap for a crumpled bill. She hands it over and the vendor whips it away. It disappears into his pocket and he turns back around to the radio, adjusts the long, segmented antennae. The reggae is overcome by static as the woman leaves the stand, her children still trailing behind, all three pairs of eyes fixed on Henry as they stumble forward after their mother then disappear into the crowd.
*
Jakob swallows his TB pills and looks at his mother who is sleeping in her cot. She is thinner. Each time he grasps her wrist there is less of it, more of his hand can wrap around it. Despite all the medicine that has been poured into her by pills or tubes, she is dwindling in size and energy and, worst of all, spirit. Perhaps the sing’anga’s treatment had not been as useless
as he had thought. Perhaps he should seek him out again, bring back something from his coffers: some foul-smelling bottle or dried up herb paste. Maybe there was less magic in the bottles and more in whatever deals he made with the spirits in the darkness of his hut after he took the money. Perhaps the man had done more than just smoke and spit after all. Jakob sits on the edge of his mother’s cot and taps his club foot on the floor. It twists inward and he has to walk on the side of it. The hard floors here make it ache more.
He can’t bring anything back from the sing’anga until he has some money to buy it with. He misses going with his cousins to the market and hawking their wares. Some of his cousins are talented woodworkers, hatching all sorts of ornaments, gadgets, tables and chairs out of the raw pieces of wood. Jakob has no skill with a knife. Jakob’s job had been to help sell the items. Even as a child he somehow knew what to say, how to look, which passersby to pester. He could pull a smile from the most sour-faced tourist and, soon after the smile appeared, he could get them to part with the kwacha they had hidden somewhere in one of their pockets. They all had kwacha, even when they said they didn’t.
Jakob misses his cousins and he misses his job and he misses the money they shared with him after a sale. But every time he thinks about going home his mot
her, without even looking, senses him nearby and says “Aliyense, you’re here” so quietly that only he can hear. And then he again knows his purpose. He will have to make a life here, in this space.
It is one of the nurses who helps him find work. Maria. She appears there beside him when the head hospital custodian is looking doubtfully down at him—short, with eyes too big for his face, barely a neck, and legs and arms still too thin to be much use. “How old are you, anyway?” Jakob pipes in: “Eighteen,” although he is only fifteen. “He carried his mother here when she could not stand on her own. He carried her for miles.” Maria says this to the custodian, and it is true. Then she points at his club foot which he has been trying to tuck discreetly out of sight. “That foot,” she says, “is where his power lies. It gives him great strength.” The custodian turns his doubtful gaze to Jakob’s short and twisted foot. “It better not bring me bad luck.” Jakob stands on it to emphasize its wholesome and honest capabilities. The worker sighs and says he will speak to his manager. He warns Jakob that the pay is meagre—barely enough to cover a meal a day and Jakob shrugs this off, tingling all over with the possibility of money—a regular stream of it. And, later that day, the custodian hands Jakob a mop, and tells him where the buckets are, and which room to begin his work.
*
Jakob is rolling a bucket of clean water behind him when he sees the redheaded doctor rushing down the hall and this is the next thing that sets this doctor apart: no one rushes around here. Jakob feels the push of air as the doctor moves past and then watches his long white coat flap behind him down the hall. Jakob, still dragging his mop and bucket behind him, follows.