by Lucie Wilk
He hears a shout and sees someone wave, over by an enormous baobab tree with generous branches and plenty of shade. The children grab his hands and direct him over to the tree. “Mister, mister, here!” They lead him to the tree trunk and pull him down so he sits.
The man who waved them over approaches Henry with a broad smile. Henry recognizes them; he was in the group of men greeting them when they first arrived. He holds something in his hands, a wooden box which he holds out to Henry. “This … bao” is all he manages. The children move in, their hands on the box. They open it up, reveal the carved holes, the round, dried seeds nestled in the holes, two to a pod. A game. The man gestures to Henry, then to himself, then to the game.
“I don’t know how to play.”
The man smiles broadly and nods. His long, lean fingers reach for the game and Henry hands it over. Henry places his hands over his chest. “Henry.” Then he points to the man. “You are … ”
“Elias! He Elias!” The children chime in, bouncing back and forth between the men, delighted to be witness to their awkward introduction, thrilled to be able to chaperone the exchange as knowledgeable intermediaries. The man smiles again. “El-i-as,” he pronounces with some pride. He says it slowly, exaggerating each syllable. He turns his attention to the game, points to the board, “Bao.” “Ba-wo,” Henry copies, sounding it out like Elias had, and Elias nods perfunctorily.
Elias places the game between them, opens it up. He accounts for all the pieces, and then places the pieces, hard round wrinkled seeds, into the holes in a specific pattern. Henry watches carefully. Elias leads. He picks up seeds from one of the holes and disperses them into the adjacent holes. He sits back, smiles, and gestures for Henry to follow suit. He reaches out for a hole containing two seeds. Before he can reach them, Elias makes a loud tsk and the children are laughing. “No, Mister!”
Not allowed, then. He reaches for seeds in another hole, but again the loud, disappointed tsk and the laughing children. He selects from another row, and there is a hopeful silence. He feels the group willing him to make the right move. He moves the seeds over, places them in two other holes, one in each. The children squat down, pleased, and Elias leans back, touches his fingers to his mouth, smiles.
And so the game progresses, Henry fumbling through, guided by the children who react to his every move like irrepressible ripples through a pond. Elias, with his stern tsks, and his pleased smiles, his encouraging chuckles. Eventually, there are just a few seeds left on the board, and Henry watches as Elias scoops them up, moves them into one of his pods. He smiles, bows again to Henry. He packs up the board, pieces locked inside and stands up.
“Tionana.” He says and walks swiftly away.
“Tionana,” replies Henry after him, not sure if this is the correct response. He looks at the children, and they beam back at him. He wants to remain here, under the tree, saying nothing and doing nothing and, when Iris’s aunt finds him there and beckons him to follow her to her hut, presumably for breakfast, he follows reluctantly.
*
Iris eats with her grandfather. They are both silent. Iris knows how her grandfather feels about talking—that it is a distraction, a winding path that leads one away from the truth. The more talk, the further from truth one wanders, until there is no way back. Writing is even worse. The finality of words on a page. Like a cage. A trap that reinforces the notion that things can be known, that things can be permanent, fixed in place and time. A trap that pushes the unknown to the boundaries of consciousness, that causes one to fear the unknown, and to cling to what is written as though it will keep one safe. In years past, her grandfather has shaken his head sadly at her books, the books she brought back from school when she was a child. Even when she lived here, in the village, she read books. She learned to read in a one-room schoolhouse that was built by missionaries many years ago. She recalls the school being quite far from the village. It seemed she spent more time walking to and from the school than she spent in the classroom learning. Not all of the village children attended classes. There was only one school and one teacher for many surrounding villages and, on any given day, there were only a few children gathered in the room, peering at the blackboard, trying to make sense of the dusty white scratches that the teacher made on it.
Iris’s mother insisted that her children attend the classes. When they were young, she would walk the long way with them, but as they grew older, her mother would wave to them from the hut, confident that they would keep going, all the way to the school. Eventually, Iris was the only one who kept going, her brother and sisters would break away, run off to play with their friends from neighbouring villages. Iris, on her own, continued to attend. She studied the chalk markings until they were no longer mysterious. Then she turned to the mysteries inside the pages of books. There had been a modest collection of books at the schoolhouse, presumably dropped off over the years by charities. Some were written in English, used by Western children, their names printed in pencil at the top right corner of the first page. William. Alice. Maude. Harry. She imagined these children, dressed in fine clothes, reading under the shade of a large, leafy tree near a river, as often depicted in the stories the books contained. She sought out similar places to read, or as best she could get to them. She felt a connection with these children who read the same words, somewhere across the world, where there were oceans of green lawns and gardens.
Iris looks over at her grandfather with his head bent to his nsima, focused on the food. Her father’s father. What would he think of her medical textbooks? What would he think of all the diagrams of the microscopic cells that make up the body, and all the molecules that communicate with these cells, numbering in the millions? He would shake his head. He would say it was a dream, a fantasy cooked up by minds who feel so compelled to know things, and who feel so compelled to show others what they know. And even if it were true, what good could come from knowing it, and from documenting it? Only the finality of a closed door. Only stagnation. And, eventually, only decay. This is what he would say, gazing regretfully out at whatever was in front of him: the bark of a tree, the progress of an ant, the skeleton of a leaf. He would shake his head.
He shakes his head now, looking down at his plate. He is smiling.
“You are a good cook,” he says, “just like your mother.”
“Thank you.”
She waits. “I’m sure the boy will be well taken care of in Blantyre. There are good doctors there.”
“Hm.”
She watches him move the nsima from plate to mouth. He has a tremor now, whenever he uses his hands. He has not been washing. She wonders who has been helping look after him. This would have been her job, or one of her sisters. Surely her aunt helps out.
“Are you well, Grandfather? Is there anything I can help with?”
“I notice you have become important. And ambitious. Just like your mother.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“Is that all you need to do? Just say it?”
Iris does not reply. For some reason, she doesn’t feel the shame she is meant to.
“Your head is hardening.” He leans over, knocks on it twice. He nods, as though he has confirmed his suspicions. “Hard.” He sighs. “Your grandmother must be so disappointed.”
Iris holds her tongue. She doesn’t mention the visit to the grave, or the python. She doesn’t because it would seem disingenuous, and perhaps it would be. Perhaps his accusations are true.
“What did she do?” she asks. “Why did she leave?”
“Who?”
“My mother.”
He chooses silence and she does not press it.
“She is not well. I’m worried.”
Her grandfather sighs heavily. “Yes.”
“She will not seek help. She won’t go to the hospital and she won’t see the sing’anga.”
“Yes.”
“She won’t see the doctors that I work with. The ones she wanted me to learn from. The ones she says have so much wisdom and knowledge. She says that type of medicine is good for some people, not for her.” Iris begins to scrape at her bowl with quick, rough movements. She struggles to contain her frustration in front of her grandfather.
“She lost her way a long time ago.” This is muttered into his nsima.
Another long moment passes and then he says: “But she prays, doesn’t she?”
Iris hesitates. Surely he must know which God she prays to. “Yes.” She refrains from elaborating. As she finishes her meal, she wonders if her grandfather has answered her question.
Chapter 15
Henry watches Alile’s girl, Mkele. She sits in the corner of the yard and plays alone, with a cloth doll that she dresses and undresses, chatting to it in the nurturing tones of a young mother.
Mkele’s mother is not here. Iris is not here either. He wonders where she is, hopes that she is safe, and then feels silly for the worrying—after all, this is her home, not his. These are her people. He is the strange one, the stranger.
So far, they seem to expect little of him, smiling at him with such benevolence, perhaps even a little pity, or is he imagining that? Iris’s aunt moved around the hut, tidying up after his breakfast. After completing his meal, he stood and offered to help but she waved him away, shaking her head, smiling. Always smiling.
Henry wonders how the boy with the fractured femur is doing. No doubt Ellison has already operated, and he is probably lying in the recovery room, coming to from the anaesthetic. He wonders when they will return.
In the rush to take the boy to the hospital, Ellison left with all the medical equipment still packed away in the trunk of the car—everything Henry would require to be of use. And all around him he has seen the need—Kwashiorkor babies, TB, bilharzia.
Over in the corner of the yard, Mkele coughs. A wet, productive cough and he wonders if it could be TB. She has that look about her—somehow sallow despite the warm brown of her skin. She swallows whatever she has just coughed up and continues playing. He goes inside the hut, rummages through his backpack and returns with his stethoscope. From the shade in the front of the hut, he calls her name. The girl looks up at him, squinting into the sun. Her features are bright and sharp in the sunlight. Her long nose, the angles of her clavicles above the neckline of the loose blue dress she wears, a dress that is much too large for her narrow frame. But her eyes are hidden, screwed up tight from the squinting. Henry beckons her over and she stands then walks slowly over to him, her doll abandoned in the dirt.
He places the earbuds of the stethoscope in his ears, feels them press in and seal sound out. He gently pulls her a little closer from where she stands still a foot away. He places his stethoscope on her back and tells her to breathe. When she does nothing, he takes big deep breaths himself and encourages her to do the same. She looks at him. A moment passes and then she takes in a mouthful of air. He cannot hear the breath over the scratchy movement of the cloth of her dress. He squats down and reaches under her loose dress and places the scope directly on the warm skin of her back. He takes another deep breath and she does the same. They breath like this, in unison, in and out. In. Out. In. Out. Beneath his stethoscope, beneath the warm skin of her back, beneath her birdlike ribs and the muscle stretched between them, her lungs fill then empty over and over and he can hear the echoing cavities, he can hear the air pop and whistle and squeeze through the swollen passageways. In. Out. They stay like this, longer than truly necessary. He knows it. And he thinks, I never listened to her. I never held her and listened to her. And when he finally looks up and sees Alile across the yard, when he hears her voice, sharp, calling her daughter’s name, and when Mkele runs from him over to her mother, he stands and takes his stethoscope out of his ears and the sounds are much louder now, and the sound of Mkele’s voice as she tells her mother what happened is shrill and accusing. It is not the sound, not the voice he was hoping to hear.
He clears his throat and says something. He says, “I think she has TB.” Alile takes Mkele’s hand and leaves the yard, leaves him standing there with his stethoscope dangling from his hand, alone.
Henry moves along the fences, grateful for the shade of trees that he passes under, patches of bright sunlight dappling his face in quick succession as he walks. Dark, light, dark, light. It feels good to be walking. He should have done this hours ago. As he passes villagers, they are quick with a greeting and he responds, trying to imitate their cadence, trying to suppress the natural tendency to inflect upward at the end of the reply. They laugh, good-natured, at his attempts, wave as he passes. Henry walks past the tree where he played the game of bao, but Elias is not there. A few women now sit in its shade, weaving mats out of long, thin, green palm leaves. They sing together as they work: a quiet, low melody.
For the first time today, Henry notices the mountain. It rises just beyond the nearest trees; the village nestles at its feet. He had forgotten how close they are to the mountain, and he stops walking, stands and looks at it. His eyes climb its flanks appreciatively, take in the scrabble of brush along its lower haunches, then rise up to the bald, rocky massif above the trees.
He feels something, a tingle in his scalp, and he turns to see a villager looking at him in a way that is neither friendly nor hostile. Somewhere in between, still waiting to pass final judgement. Henry raises a hand in greeting. “Moni,” he says.
After a deliberate pause, the man lifts his hand. “Moni.”
This is the man who attended the child with the fractured leg. Perhaps he is a healer of some sort, a herbalist. The man watches Henry’s face, and sees the recognition dawn. He turns and begins to walk through a space in the fence large enough for one man to pass. The man stops midway through and looks back at Henry, gestures with a wave of his hand to follow him, so he follows, sidling through the narrow opening in the fence and into the space beyond it. It is just a yard like the others, with a hut positioned at the far end of it, except there is a garden within this yard, off to the side. A herb and vegetable garden, with plants of different varieties planted in orderly rows. The leaves spring up from the ground, robust and impossibly green. The man walks across the yard, along the side of the hut then behind it. Henry follows him.
Behind the hut it is cool and shady. A man lies on the step—a raised platform of mud which serves as the foundation of the hut. The man—alarmingly thin—is slumped against the wall of the hut. This man is ill. Critically ill. He breathes with his intercostal muscles—the short muscles that run between the ribs—and his abdomen pulls in with each breath rather than filling out, a sign of diaphragmatic exhaustion. End-stage respiratory failure. His limbs splay out, no longer struggling, already succumbing to the fatigue, every ounce of his energy dedicated to the task of breathing. His eyes roll up toward Henry, then to the healer beside him. He lifts a hand an inch off the ground then drops it.
The healer turns to Henry and then holds his hand palm up, out to the man on the step, as if to say: “He’s all yours.”
Henry kneels down and curls his fingers around the man’s wrist to feel his pulse but doesn’t find it so he moves his hand to the crook of his neck, just under the angle of his jaw, to feel for his carotid pulse. It is a fleeting whir under his fingertips, rapid and weak. Henry moves his hand away. He has no stethoscope, but even if he had one, what would he do with it? Listen to his laboured breaths? The cataclysmic contractions of his heart?
The man’s wishbone mandible strains upward and below it his neck is all taut strings and the raw machinations of breath, the trachea tugging down with each heave of his lungs, with each stingy mouthful of air sucked in. It’s too damn difficult to watch so Henry fixes on the man’s right hand. The veins are flat down, the hand as smooth as a young boy’s. At home he’d be putting in a line by now, shoving plastic into a vein in the neck or a leg, and a bag of fluid t
hrough that to get some volume into him. The man’s legs are loose and limp and already forgotten, already irrelevant. His trousers—faded black cotton, are worn thin at the knees as though he spent his days praying, the waistband loose and gaping over his stomach. His abdomen draws in, draws down. His ribs spread a fraction on each side then collapse in over and over in gasps, striated like gills.
Henry feels the jagged impatience of the healer on his back, the vacuum of this man’s death before him. He stretches out his hand and places it on the man’s chest, slides it over the ribs on the left side, spreads his fingers over the spaces between the ribs so he can feel the apex of the man’s heart tapping against his fingers. After a moment, the man’s eyes squeeze shut and his right hand flattens against the earth. His fingers tighten around a fistful of dust. Henry holds his heart and the man holds the earth and the earth does what it always does—stays hard and ungraspable and his heart keeps squeezing bolus after bolus of blood out to the edges of him despite the pull of gravity getting stronger and stronger.
The steady tapping beneath Henry’s fingers now changes, it becomes erratic and disorganized and Henry pulls his hand back. Fuck oh fuck oh fuck. He looks up at the tree branches hanging uselessly down and at the sky between them and at the fence that hems them into this dusty yard where there is nothing, not a thing here that he can use to change this heartbeat back to a good one. He stares at that chest tugging down and in, down and in, and at those eyes that have opened again and roll from him to the healer, him to the healer, and at that hand that claws at the ground. Henry looks anywhere but at his face but feels the glare of the whites of his eyes and he wants him to close them so he cannot see all this, so he cannot see the culmination of the moments before his death. So he won’t see Henry sitting there bearing witness to it and doing nothing.