by Lucie Wilk
When Jakob enters the ward where the doctor has gone, there is a cluster of people standing around a bed in the middle of the room. Around this cluster the rest of the ward spreads out flat, silent and still.
Jakob spots the thatch of the doctor’s red hair. He is the same man he’d seen in the market and he is now bent over the patient who lies in the bed. Then the doctor straightens. He is so tall. And now his voice rises up above the cluster of people, above the beds, above it all: “Why didn’t you get me sooner? A person shouldn’t die from pneumonia.” The doctor directs his pale-eyed gaze from one nurse to the next, then to the collection of people assembled around the patient who lies so still he is certainly dead. The faces that look back at the doctor do so defiantly, or so it seems to Jakob as he watches from the doorway. He is ashamed of their defiance. The doctor spins on a heel and stalks out of the ward. He brushes past Jakob—the sleeve of his white coat actually grazes his bare arm—and Jakob watches him go.
He fingers the spot where the coat sleeve touched him. It tingles there, with the doctor’s angry energy. Jakob wishes, hopes, prays, that this man can be his mother’s doctor. This is a man who knows how to fight.
Chapter 4
Somewhere in the darkness, hippos shift and rouse. Henry can see their large, formless shapes moving against the dark grey sky. At this hour of the morning, everything is shades of grey, but he can now tell them apart—the bushes from the hippos. And the river: he is beginning to sense its movement in the muddy pre-dawn glow. For some reason, with the increasing light, he can hear more, too. He is aware of the river lapping, of hippos wading and greeting each other with grunts and moans—a surprisingly porcine sound.
Ellison shifts to his right, arranges himself on a narrow log, and releases a long, satisfied sigh. Art Ellison: an Aussie surgeon, an ex-pat who has settled himself here so definitively, has planted his feet like a non-native plant species that thrives despite the foreign environment. Ellison wades through life like a cowboy—rough, unapologetic, land-loving—and Malawi is his Wild West. Henry has assisted him in the operating theatre. Ellison is fearless there. He forges ahead, creating a solution that usually forgoes aesthetics for function. Henry once watched him resect a tumour from the jaw of a Malawian patient. This man had lived with the tumour growing in his mandible for years. Not knowing there was treatment, he’d accommodated its growth—by then to the size of a tennis ball—without questioning it. Ellison had spotted the man during an outreach clinic and corralled him back to Blantyre and into his operating theatre. He’d chopped it out and wired in a hunk of rib to replace the mandible. The man woke up from his surgery without the mass, with a small, lopsided half-jaw in its place. Examining the man post-operatively, Ellison had frowned, then grinned, standing tall, his big frame filling the ward. It’ll do, he’d bellowed, squeezing the man’s shoulder with his large hand.
Henry is aware of Ellison sinking onto the log to his right, settling in like a boulder. Big, muscular limbs, face wide, ruddy and friendly, his body is as large as his personality. Henry hears him breathe in the marshy, muddy air with noisy deliberation. As far as Henry knows, Ellison has no wife, no children. His love affair is with the land.
Ellison invited Henry on this trip, to attend an outreach clinic in Mlela, a town he visits once a month. They arrived at the hostel the previous evening, were waved in by the cheerful owner and shared a drink with him before retiring for the night. Ellison promised a hippo sighting if Henry was willing to rise before dawn. They met in front of the hostel in the dark, just after the chorus of rooster crows, and walked around to the back, down a narrow, overgrown path a few hundred metres to the river’s edge.
The hippos, farther away than he’d thought now that he can see them clearly, gather in the shallow water and nuzzle each other with wide, wet snouts. They are across the river, on the opposite bank. Closer to Henry, just a few feet away, a heron moves its stilted legs through the reeds. Closer still, a small spider picks its way through a tangle of grass.
Henry sits and watches the river, feeling like he should be feeling more. Beside him, Ellison grows with each breath, opening up to the African morning like fog dispersing in the sun. But Henry remains the same, a small tight fist of uncertainty. He stares long and hard at the heron, watching for a clue, for a hint of what is to come. The heron moves its head and an almond-shaped, unblinking eye regards him, telling him nothing.
Henry is the first doctor in a long line of carpenters, the first Bryce boy to stray from this calling, and his hands are proof of it—pale and smooth as they take an unearned rest now, clasped between his knees. He should have been a surgeon—a carpenter of the body—he would have derived some satisfaction from the simple and gratifying surgical approach to illness: take it out.
His father’s hands had been large, rough and calloused. Hands that could fix anything. His father had watched Henry try, once in a while, to handle some wood, run it past the chewing blades of the saw. It hadn’t come naturally to Henry and his father had in many ways been relieved. He’d nudged Henry to read, to do what he seemed to do easily: to study, like his mother. Like any parent, he’d hoped for a good life for him, and education was the key. Knowledge was freedom; this was the doctrine that had been uttered through the house as he grew up. But science has betrayed him and the trust, what it all hinges on, what everything hinges on, has been lost.
He knows what Sarah would think if she were here. She would think what he thought when he first arrived. She would think that he has come to a place where the magic of pharmaceuticals can be displayed in a dramatic and spectacular way, a fireworks of lifesaving glory. Even after what happened, she never lost her faith in the scientific method. She pressed her lips together and returned with new vigour to her job. Right now, he could use her unrelenting enthusiasm for pharmaceutical technology. Her staunch belief in the reliability of calculated treatment success. This is what she does for a living, and does it well. She presents the miracle of science to doctors, shows them how science can change the world by removing pain and illness. And where better a place to show the healing capacity of drugs than here?
And yet the opposite has been the case. The exact opposite. Here, more than anywhere else, he is reminded of the limits of things. He brings his gaze from the river back to his hands, examines the tortuous path of his veins under his skin. He knows exactly where he begins and ends, now. He is all too familiar with where he ends.
Ellison stirs beside him. Moves his hands and arms upward, pushes his chest out in a mighty stretch, as if he has just woken up. He turns toward Henry, smiles with heavy-lidded eyes. “Stunning, eh?”
Henry nods and squints at the sun, now above the bush, the heat from it penetrating the mist that still swirls off the river. “Must be getting close to seven,” he says. “What time are we expected at the clinic?”
“Whenever we arrive.” Ellison pats him on the back and then rises to his feet, starts up the path to the hostel.
*
Ellison’s car meanders along the road to the outreach clinic, a short bumpy ride down a single, unpaved lane. The crowd outside the clinic watches their arrival. Ellison pulls the vehicle to a stop beside the building—a concrete box with a rusty corrugated roof. Usually the town church, Henry was told. The crowd, though large, is surprisingly quiet as they part to allow the doctors to pass and enter.
Once inside, Henry waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. There are two small windows on opposite walls. The air is ripe with bodies: sour and pungent. Patients—mostly women with children—fill the pews in two rows of closely spaced benches. A man greets them with a large grin and a strong handshake. “Welcome, Doctors. Come, come.” He wears a shirt with the black and white collar of a pastor or priest. He beckons them down the aisle between the pews, past the altar, and through a door in the back of the building. The brightness stings Henry’s eyes as he passes through the door into the space behind the ch
urch. It is an outdoor room, walled off with mud, but without a roof. A bench on either end, tucked discreetly behind stick-walled screens: the examining areas.
“I held the first clinic inside the church. Couldn’t see a damn thing, so we built this.” Ellison sweeps his hand around the space. “Took a week.”
“Nice work.”
“I’m going to have to scare up some clear plastic for the roof. Otherwise first rain, we’re in trouble.”
Henry places the duffle bag filled with equipment—gloves, needles, syringes, medication—on the ground, swings his backpack off his shoulders and fishes around for his stethoscope.
“Rare’n to go, mate?” Ellison grins.
“Loads of people waiting out there. We only have two days.”
Ellison shrugs. “You do what you can. And then you call it a day.”
Henry ducks through the door and into the church, into the darkness and back to the pews where the crowd waits. They are more lively when he appears, tangibly expectant. They watch him approach the closest patient, a woman with a baby bundled in colourful cloth and carried behind her. The baby sleeps, his eyes closed and cheeks slack against her upper back. The woman lifts her eyes when Henry stands beside her. When she stands up, he leads her through the door and into the sunlit clinic.
*
The clinic, the church, the people, all become indistinct in the wake of dust and exhaust that they leave behind them. A crowd watches them go; a few of them wave. The rest turn away and walk back in clumps along the road.
Henry turns and faces forward, presses his fist into the dash, tightens his jaw. The duffle bag in the back seat is loose and nearly empty. All the syringes, IV bags, tubing, needles, gloves, bottles of drugs used up on this group of people and who knew how long it would sustain them. One duffle bag. An embarrassingly paltry effort.
“Why do you do it?”
Ellison glances over at Henry. “What’s that, mate?”
“Why do you do it? What brought you here?”
“Fame and fortune.”
Henry looks out the window at the grasslands that shrug and twitch in the wind like the hide of a beast. Its power lies in its unpredictability, its random swings of fate. All he has is his rationality, the ability to string one logical thought after another, like beads on a necklace, his own rosary, which he uses to pull himself along, to move from place to place, decision to decision.
Out the window on his right is a field, cleared of tall grass and filled with stones organized into neat piles or cairns, and these organized into rows. Ellison glances over at the same view.
“Graves.”
“There must be hundreds of them.”
“AIDS.” He juts a thumb backwards, toward the clinic they just left. “Whole villages orphaned. Like those kids we just saw.”
“I thought it was a paediatric clinic.”
“It was by necessity. That’s mostly all there is.”
They are silent after this. The grave field is gone, replaced with the waving grasses, a few low hills in the distance. He could imagine that this place is uninhabited, or inhabited only by the dead. When he sees two boys waving sticks at some cattle, and their mother with hips swaying as she carries an urn of water on her head, he is irrationally relieved.
Those who have survived this place have learned acceptance. Everywhere he looks, there is acceptance, eyes closing so easily to what is offered, to what is placed before them: illness, drought, hunger. Even Ellison, in his large-chested, hearty way, accepts things here, puts up with the lack. Now he sits there in the driver’s seat so definitively, meaty fingers clasped around the small steering wheel, jerking it left, right, left, around potholes, people and animals. Farm fowl skitter faster at the roar of the engine, make half-hearted attempts to fly. Cattle roam at the same slow pace, unmoved by the threat of a vehicle approaching. And the people. The people walk, sway to the side, wave through the dust, lift up their baskets of fruit and meat. Muli bwangi, they mouth, smiling through the noise, dust, heat and exhaust. Muli bwangi. Henry looks through the window, presses his fingers to it, knows that from the perspective of the people on the road he is a ghost who is there and then is gone. A fleeting, wan visage, indistinct through the dust and the reflection of the sun off the glass, staring out at them with pale eyes and a grim mouth.
Mulanje Mountain. Henry had been able to see it from the clinic and now, as they drive toward it, it rises up off the horizon, grey and formidable like a hippo rising from the river, rivulets of water dripping off its back and catching the sun as they plunge to the plains below. It is an inselberg, a rocky massif that has resisted erosion over the centuries and stands alone, a granite island, surrounded by an ocean of featureless plains as far as the eye can see. A halo of cloud encircles the higher mountain reaches and the rounded peaks jut above them, grey-brown against the blue sky. “Island in the sky” it has been called locally, and it is regarded with fear and respect by the Malawians who live near it.
Before they return to Blantyre, they will climb it.
Henry and Ellison leave their vehicle parked on the side of the road close to the mountain, sling their packs over their shoulders, and set off on one of the trails that snakes its way up. Initially, they wind through a forest where gnarled trunks of ancient cedar and cypress trees twist skyward. The moss, clinging to stones and trunks, the heady scent of soil and chlorophyll, the sense of enclosure is strange to Henry now, having adapted to the exposed plains elsewhere in the country. They plunge through the stillness with large and heavy steps over rocks and roots, with grunts and effort. Occasionally a mist moves in and further darkens the mountain, muffling it, making the sounds of their breath an affront to the quiet of this place.
The muscles of his legs clench and push against the land and propel Henry upward despite the strong pull of gravity, the tangible effort to keep him low, to keep him down. His legs keep pushing, his feet keep their grip on the loose pebbles, jutting rocks, sliding mud.
Eventually the forest thins and then disappears altogether and they are above everything but the bald, treeless peak of Mulanje Mountain.
Legends circle the mountain: they are carried around and around it by those who live at its foot. Ellison had described them with a bemused smile earlier on the drive to the mountain. “You should know that we are embarking on a dangerous
journey.” He said this with a twitch of his mouth, glancing over at Henry. Nudge. Wink. “The locals say there is an evil presence there.”
“Evil.” Henry had said. “What sort of evil are we talking about?”
Ellison spread his hands in front of the steering wheel. “Oh, you know, mysterious winds. People disappearing. That sort of thing. The usual witchcraft and sorcery.”
“Here?”
“Oh, it’s here, all right. You’ll see. The longer you’re here, the more you’ll be aware of it.”
“Do you believe in that stuff?”
Ellison waved a hand in the air, vague, all-encompassing. “It’s like all religion and superstition. It serves a purpose. Keeps people in line. Provides an explanation. Gives them a sense of meaning.”
Henry and Ellison reach a plain as the sky begins to darken. From here, they can see the setting sun; it sheds hasty orange light before it sinks down out of sight. After climbing uphill for so long, it is strange, this new flatness to the mountain, as though the thing they walk on has grown weary and has laid itself down for the night.
They pass through the grassy field and as the sky darkens completely they make their way down a slope, a brief descent to a hut that Henry cannot see but can smell—the spicy sweetness of cedar wood burning in an open fire. The hut keeper greets them with a nod when they arrive and drop their packs on the wooden slats of the deck. By the light of the fire and with little discussion, Henry and Ellison prepare a stew; they chop the vegetables and meat they carried up the mountain
and drop the food into a battered aluminum pot that they hang over the flames and then wait.
Fatigue settles over Henry. Ellison is a dark bundle beside him on the bench. Both of them stare at the fire, watch their pot as it chars in the flames. Ellison peeks inside, stirs the contents, then replaces the lid and sits back down.
“My ex would’ve hated this.” Why can’t he say ex-wife?
The same reason he can’t say daughter.
“Hmm?” Ellison shifts on the bench.
“At home. My ex—she would have hated this.” Henry leans forward, closer to the fire until he can’t take the heat on his face anymore and leans back. “She’s very much a city girl. Lipstick and nail polish and all that. She’s a drug rep.”
“In bed with the devil, were you?” Ellison chuckles.
“Sarah.” Her name is pulled into the smoke of the fire. He imagines black, charred wisps that are carried up the flue, then are swept away by the wind, scattered over the mountain.
Henry turns to Ellison. “You?”
“No, no drug reps in my past, although tempted many times.”
“I mean, any girlfriends, anyone serious.”
“An ex-wife. But she wasn’t serious.”
Henry watches the yellow flames advance along the wood, a steady consumption that leaves a trail of mottled black in its wake. He started planning the trip when he knew he’d lost her. When it was official. This is why he is here, staring at a fire on a mountain in Africa. One last lurching effort to hold on to things, aspects of life that can be grasped, like where you live, what you do, who you help. Not who you love, though. Or who you lose. This, he now knows, cannot be grappled down, held to the ground, fixed in place. And he feels less naïve in the knowing. As he sits here staring at the fire, Henry feels a strength, a freedom in the knowing.