by Lucie Wilk
*
When she arrives at work, Dr. Bryce is already there. He does not wear his lab coat. He does not have his stethoscope with him. And worse: he does not tend to patients. They watch him. They lie on their cots, propped up on their elbows, and look on with faces shiny with sweat. The doctor crouches in a corner of the ward, rummages through equipment of some kind. He pulls out a roller then starts rolling it back and forth in the tray on the ground. He is painting. The doctor is painting the walls. This trip to Mulanje Mountain is showing itself—the seeds of the doctor’s undoing have been planted. He is forgetting who he is. Iris scans the faces in the ward as they watch him roll the roller on the tray, then roll the paint onto the wall. It is there behind the eyes, behind the tall arches of the cheekbones and the drawn, flat mouths. It is there: the fear. They all know how easy it is for evil to take root. Even here, in this white man’s hospital, with the wooden cross affixed to the wall on the far end of the ward. She can see it now, hanging there under a thick blanket of dust. It is useless against the forces that roam here.
Dr. Bryce puts down the paint roller and stands up and stretches a long, satisfied stretch involving all the long muscles of his body. This is when he sees her, adrift among the beds, watching him. He smiles at her. A large, happy smile that she has never before seen break his face. The smile makes the red-gold beard glint in the early morning sunlight that now enters through an open window. Remarkable how those wiry strands can gleam. These white men, their brightness, their skin and hair that can catch light and then recklessly throw it back to the world; they are almost sources of light themselves, a blinding brightness wherever they go. She, Iris, swallows the light. Hoards it. It comes out in stingy flashes and only through her eyes.
“Do you like it?”
Dr. Bryce is talking to her, asking her something and gesturing to the wall behind him, where fresh paint lights up one small corner of the ward. As the sun enters the ward through the window, it makes the painted corner absurdly bright. The smell is strong; she can see some patients lying down with their blankets pulled over their noses.
“The paint?”
“Yes. The colour. Do you like it?”
Iris looks at the wall. The paint has been rolled on neatly, one smooth, thick line beside another. The colour is yellow. Unorthodox and impractical. Ridiculous, really, for a hospital ward.
“It’s yellow.”
“Yellow ochre,” he says, still smiling. “I thought it looked like the savannah. It reminds me of it.” He gestures to the window and Iris follows his arm, her eyes searching for the yellow somewhere out there, but all she can see is the red-brown earth of the courtyard with the occasional straw-like strand of grass pushing its way through. These strands are yellow, she acknowledges. Perhaps farther out from the city, where the grass has not been trampled to extinction by thousands of feet, perhaps there the grass grows long and thick enough to be seen, and appreciated. She has not been to the country since she was a child. She grew up there, in a village by the mountain, and although she does not remember much of her life there, she misses it. And for this reason, she smiles.
“Yes.” She says. “I like it.”
Now each morning, Dr. Bryce comes to the hospital early, well before the sun begins to brighten the sky near the horizon, and paints. He cleans up his supplies when the first
sunbeam enters the ward. Then he puts on his lab coat, places his stethoscope in its usual place around his neck, and begins his rounds. The other doctors observe Dr. Bryce with flat, grim expressions. The surgeon, Dr. Ellison, the paediatrician, Dr. Campbell, the internist, Dr. Kumwembe. They come into the ward with their hands deep in their pockets, or tugging on the ends of their stethoscopes that hang around their necks. They scan the ward, look over the rows of beds to the walls that are gradually being transformed, the flat grey replaced with the colour of straw. They finger their beards, they scratch their scalps, and then they go.
*
“You’ve taken on a new hobby, I see,” says Kumwembe during another of their lunchtime conversations.
“Yes.” Henry digs into his rice, forces it down in large, soft, salty balls. He eyes the nsima that Kumwembe dips into the sauce of his chicken and runs around his plate, absorbing the juices and odds and ends of food before he pushes it into his mouth. He has never been offered nsima when he brings his tray to the cook in the small hospital canteen who takes a quick, surmising look at him before heaping his plate with the usual white rice and chicken leg. He would like to try it, but doesn’t know how to ask. He shovels up another forkful of the rice, but then leaves it on the plate. “I thought it would cheer the place up,” he offers this to the silence, to the appraising look of Kumwembe.
“Cheer it up.”
“Yes.”
“It needed cheering, then.”
“Most hospitals do.”
Kumwembe dips his fingertips in the metal bowl of water beside his plate. Grease shines on the surface of the water, picks up the light in oily rainbow circles. He presses his hands on his napkin then brings his fingertips to a peak in front of his mouth, leans in closer to Henry, a co-conspirator.
“And you?” he says. “Do you need cheering up? Are you, perhaps, a little down?”
Henry looks at his food—half a plateful. He hates waste, especially here, and so lifts another forkful to his mouth, then plucks away some meat from the chicken bone.
“No. I am not depressed.”
“A little homesick, then?”
Henry sighs. “Yes. Sure. A little homesick.”
Kumwembe moves the peak made by his fingers down from his mouth, places it on the table in front of him. His fingers now form an arrowhead that points at Henry, directed at his gut, where the truth lies. “Do you like it here? Do you wish to stay?”
Henry stares at the hands, at the fingers, pale on the palms and under the nails, dark brown on the dorsum. “Yes. And yes.” He looks up at Kumwembe. “Is this some sort of interview? Are you going to report back to a committee? Are you going to recommend that I return to Canada?”
“Dr. Bryce,” he says, quietly. “You think too much, my good man. Stop thinking and you will find yourself to be much happier.”
He looks at Henry for a moment, and when Henry does not reply, he says, “Come on, then. What else do you think needs improvement?”
Henry decides that Kumwembe is not mocking him and starts to describe the things that disturb him the most. The unnecessarily neglected things, the things that would be easy to improve, with little cost. Like painting the walls or cleaning the floor and latrines. Lobbying for a few more blankets. Kumwembe listens, watches Henry’s face. He nods as he speaks. And then, quietly when Henry is finished, states: “Dr. Bryce, I will not help you. But I will not stop you.”
Henry returns his attention to his place, chooses not to think about Kumwembe’s words. For now, he can do as he likes. This is what he decides to hear.
Chapter 6
Iris squats down in front of the cook pot. When the water is near to boiling, she sprinkles in cornmeal from the bag beside her and stirs—the trick is to be quick. This way it will not clot. She feels her mother watching, judging to this day her skill in the kitchen. As she stirs, Iris looks at the bag of cornmeal. It is a bulky white ten kilogram sack with blue writing on it. The writing says in English that it was made in Lusaka.
A tall clay pot, used together with a long wooden post. This is something plumbed from the caverns of memory. The women of Mapiri, her childhood village, standing, heaving the post, grinding it into the pot, pounding the maize in the pot until it had the same consistency of the meal in the bag beside her. As a child, Iris watched them do this as she squatted nearby with her sisters and they pretended to pound their own maize.
Her mother’s legs are stretched out and her bare feet, pale and dry on the bottoms, obscure part of her mother’s face from this vant
age point. Her mother leans her head back against the wall of their home, and closes her eyes.
She addresses her mother in Chichewa.
“Do you miss home, Mama?”
“This is home.”
“You know what I mean. The village. The mountain.”
Iris’s mother lifts her head and regards her daughter. “Life is better here,” she says, before resting her head again and closing her eyes.
This is as far as the conversation usually goes with her mother. She will never admit that moving to the city was a mistake, or even that she misses her ancestral home. She will insist, until death, that moving here brought them only good fortune. “You are Educated now, Iris,” she will usually remind her, as if she doesn’t know this. “You have an Education. You work in the hospital, alongside doctors, amongst the bright and honourable minds of this country.”
And where did this get her? Cooking nsima over a cook fire in the dirt behind her home, just as she would be doing if they lived in the village, preparing lunch. No different. In fact, worse. Because she is alone. Without a husband to share her bed with. Without children for her to care for. Instead she is charged with caring for the thousands of ill that stumble through the dark corridors of the hospital, day after day, year after year. No one wants an Educated woman.
Evil drove them from the village, as her mother tells it. They ran from matsenga, hoping that the sorcery wasn’t quick or agile enough to keep up with the bus that took them here to Blantyre after all the terrible things happened. It was after the baby was lost that her mother decided enough was enough. She packed up the rest of the family and brought them all here.
But this is how it began. Her uncle came up the path to their home, his face broken into a thousand weeping faces, spilling a million tears, her father’s blood on his shirt. Her mother rushed to the accident, just over a mile from their village. Iris and her sisters and brother hadn’t been allowed to go; the arms of their relatives had enclosed them and ushered them back to their hut.
A white man from the city was driving the car, heading toward the mountain. He had swerved to avoid a flock of chickens. Chickens! (His mother had stuck on this; it kept her up at night for years afterwards). The man swerved to avoid a flock of chickens and killed her father instead. There was some talk afterwards, amongst the men. Money had been exchanged. And that was it. The men took the money and returned to the village. The white man returned to his car and drove off.
Samuel was next. Her brother fell and broke his arm. He fell from a baobab tree, from a branch he’d easily climbed to for years. There was no outreach medical clinic; the resetting and bandaging was done by the sing’anga. His arm recovered, but remains misshapen. When he removes his shirt now, there is a bone that juts out strangely, and Iris has seen her mother stare at it, as though confronting the forces that created it. Then she usually turns away and puts her mouth in a determined line, full of certainty that she did the right thing all those years ago by bringing them here.
And then Grace. Their father’s favourite. One year older than Iris, and prettier. Large, oval eyes that were golden brown. She’d looked like their mother, a spitting image. Grace was stricken by illness: shaking, chattering under her blankets in the darkness of the hut, in the oven heat of their home, while the sun beat down on the roof. Her eyes hollowed out, her cheeks collapsed in. She remembers how her sister stared past her, to something in the corner of the hut, something distasteful by the twist of her sister’s mouth and the harshness of her eyes, but something she had resigned herself to by the way she closed her eyes to it, ready for what it would bring, or take away.
Fever, rigors, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. Now, as a nurse, Iris knows these are all the signs of malaria. If they had lived here in Blantyre, she could have been treated, maybe even saved. An intravenous line with essential fluids and electrolytes. Antimalarial medication. All the rituals, incantations, all the rubbings on her skin, the protective lines of yellow and red and the black blood of sacrifice slick on the floor. And all the Christian prayers that her mother muttered, while the village healers did their work. None of this chased away whatever was in the corner, what Grace saw. Unafraid, it hunkered down and waited. And then it took her.
And when, a few weeks later, Iris’s mother’s belly bloomed again, there was something dull in her mother’s eyes. It was as though she expected the next lurching stab at her family. And when it came, when her mother’s stomach became flaccid like a punched-out balloon and her mother was not holding a baby, even six-year-old Iris felt the deep chill of terror. The baby, she was told, had joined her father and her sister, Grace. Matsenga, they said, and Iris remembers not wanting to be alone, not wanting to be the next worm on the hook for those nameless, shapeless things circling the village, circling close in on her family.
Even now, almost 25 years later, Iris feels her skin prickle with the memory. Feels the lurch in her chest, as though something has wrapped its hands around her heart and now pulls at her in short, sharp tugs, letting her know they have not been forgotten, letting her know that running to the city will not be enough to hide.
Iris looks over at her mother. Her eyes are still closed. She is not well. Her mother does less each day, does each task more slowly. She coughs with a weak effort, swallowing down whatever she has brought up. She is losing weight. Every time Iris looks at her, there are more bones showing; her collarbones push up through her skin, the sinews of her hands and arms are strung tight. She will not go to see a doctor.
The nsima is thick now, and smooth. It must be served hot, so Iris spoons it out quickly onto a plate, beside the relish that has already been prepared. She picks up the plate and brings it, with a bowl of clean water, to her mother. Her mother, sensing her standing there in front of her, opens her eyes and smiles.
She dips her hands into the water to clean them and then picks up a small piece of nsima dipped in the relish. Iris settles down beside her mother and looks out at the view from their back porch. Here, on the borders of Blantyre, their house is made of concrete with a wobbly corrugated zinc roof, squashed in with a hundred others. In the village it would have been mud with a grass roof. The view would have been of a stick fence, and over it, Mulanje Mountain framed in blue sky. Their yard would have been bigger. Here, it was a few square feet, bordered by mud walls with a sea of rubbish beyond them.
“Is that crazy white doctor still painting the walls?”
Iris is startled by her mother’s voice. It is stronger today than usual. She looks over at her; she has barely touched her food. Her mother is staring at the cook fire that smoulders before them, the smoke rising up through the hole in the roof, then pulled sideways by the wind.
Iris looks down at her own hands. There is a thin layer of yellow paint buried in the groove between one of her fingernails and her skin, which she scratches at with another nail. She hides her hands in her lap. “Yes. He’s moved on to the hallways, now.”
Her mother shakes her head. “Crazy man,” she mutters. “Why isn’t he using his God-given skill to save lives?”
“You wouldn’t let him save yours.” Iris flakes off the last of the paint from her nail. Her mother is silent, which means that it is true.
“Some people want that type of medicine,” her mother says, finally. “Some people like it. Some like their pills and procedures.”
And yet. The pride in her eyes, when she speaks of her daughter, the nurse. She worked and worked and did unmentionable things to pay Iris’s school fees. This alone created a guilt so insurmountable that Iris could only follow through and get her diploma.
“Knowledge,” her mother has said to Iris, “will give you power. So you can fight with equal weapons, when the time comes.” What time? Iris wonders. What are they waiting for? Who are they going to fight? She feels as though this is what they have been doing for years, ever since they left their village: waiting. It has been steadily drain
ing all of them of their energy, all these years of anxious expectation. They have so little fight left in them, that if the time comes, they will only be able to lie down and succumb.
Her sister Hope is married and pregnant with her fifth child. One child per year since becoming a wife. She lives in a fine house with a living room and a couch and beds and a toilet because she is married to a lawyer. A mean lawyer, though, with narrow eyes and a powerful fist when he is drunk. And he has not shied away from using it on her sister. Yet her sister stays. For her mother. They all do it for their mother, who did it for them, once.
Whenever she visits her brother Samuel who tends bar in the city, she thinks of what her mother did for them. Her brother pushes Carlsberg bottles across the tables to his customers who never raise their eyes above the tops of the bottles of beer, or the cleavage of the women who sit beside them in too-small shirts, who take suggestive sips from the bottlenecks with moist lips, allow themselves to be fondled.
It began to happen soon after they arrived in Blantyre. The late-night trips out of the house into the dark folds of a strange city. The children were left under the watch of an ageing female neighbour who understood what needed to be done. What other options were there for a young widowed mother with three hungry children?
As children they did not understand, crouching together in the house around the kerosene lantern their mother allowed them to burn in her absence. Their faces twisted up as they whispered to each other. She’s already forgotten Papa. How could she forget him so soon? Occasionally, during the night, there would be a quiet knock at the door, a low, masculine voice murmuring her mother’s name. And her mother would get up off the mat, shuffle over to the door and shoo him away, whispering through the crack of the door, fed up, tired.
Eventually, Iris’s mother found a job sorting laundry at the hospital, and this is where the idea struck her, that Iris should become a nurse. Why was Iris charged with this responsibility? Perhaps because she was the oldest, the most serious, did the best in her studies, was the least likely to marry. She had none of her mother’s remarkable features: the light brown eyes, the long nose, the wide, full lips, breasts and buttocks. Both of her sisters and even her brother had some of these features: physical proof that they were all of the same stock. Iris was her father. Down to his dark and deep-set eyes, his serious brow, and his quiet, stubborn intelligence. Perfectly suited for a serious job like nursing.