by Lucie Wilk
Lay on your goddamn hands. Do something. He forces himself to look, finally. From the trousers that already seem empty and from the man’s closed fist, Henry drags his gaze up to the man’s face and he sees his eyes still with the fight, still staring at Henry, still waiting. Still filled with the fucking hope.
Henry looks up at the healer. Shakes his head.
“It is no use.”
The healer does something with his mouth. The lips move into a smudged line—not a smile, but something akin to one. Affirmation. He flicks his hand at Henry and Henry stands, moves back, feels the nausea rise up, the world close in.
The healer kneels in Henry’s place, puts his hand on the man’s chest, not over the heart as Henry had done, over the centre of it. His other arm reaches behind him, flaps at Henry: go. Henry turns and leaves. Once outside the fence, he begins to run.
His legs push hard, move mechanically and his breath forces his tight chest open. He moves forward, forward, into the bright white space in front of him that peels open as he pushes through it. His breath comes fast and tight in sharp, irregular heaves but as he moves it starts to slow down into large, deep lungfuls of air and becomes regular again, the smooth regular inhalations of a healthy man with healthy lungs and a healthy heart.
Henry slows down to a walk and then finally stops. Beads of sweat coalesce and then slide down his face, his chest, into the cleft between his buttocks. His clothes are discoloured with sweat and dust. He is wearing long trousers, as most men do here, and the feel of the fabric against his skin is unbearable. He sits down on a boulder and leans over to roll up the legs of his chinos. He unbuttons his shirt. The cool air on his skin slows down his breathing, allows him to take bigger, calmer breaths. He looks around.
Somehow he has made his way to the foot of the mountain, on one of the trails that leads upward, through to the sky which now gazes on him with benevolent indifference. The wide, blue sky. This sight is supposed to reassure, to be calming, hopeful. But he is panicked by it. It serves as a reminder of how trapped he is, of how damn expansive this place is, no matter how far he runs, swims, crawls, he will always see it.
There is no one here at the trailhead but him. There is an unearthly quiet about the place, considering the bustling village only a mile or so away.
He leans forward, rests his forearms on his thighs and gazes at his hands. His veins bulge. The last thing his hands touched was the man who lay dying, who is probably already dead.
How many deaths has he overseen? How many times have his efforts to revive patients in some variety of cardiac arrest failed? God, the temerity with which he used to battle death when he worked in the hospital in Toronto. After compressing the chest, administering IV drugs, establishing an airway, assisting breathing, all performed relentlessly on the lifeless body, someone inevitably uttered: “Let’s call it.” At this point everyone stepped back, away from the body, and gazed at the clock. Time of death. Synonymous with the time at which the resuscitation team agreed to give up, although death had been in the room with them long before this. There, death happened in the midst of a flurry of activity, death wasn’t acknowledged until the medical team agreed to acknowledge it, as though the medical team had the final say, and not death itself.
Here in the village, death had its grip on the man’s body. It was squeezing the breath out of him. And Henry retreated from the challenge. Somehow he felt like he was in its territory, he was stepping on its ground. He was an intruder in death’s workshop, not the other way around.
He still feels the tapping of the man’s heart on the pads of his fingers, the strain of muscle moving from regular to erratic, from control to chaos.
He thinks now, of the things he could have done. He could have done a throat sweep, even tried the Heimlich manouever. Or a makeshift tracheostomy. He could have looked for signs of a tension pneumothorax which can be treated with a simple needle puncture, the creation of a release valve. It was endless, the list of possibilities that were still relevant, even here, in rural Malawi. He could have tried.
Henry folds down on himself, cradles his head in his hands. In those moments, looking at the dying man, he felt incomplete. Without devices, medications, an ICU nearby with all its infrastructure. Without a hospital attached to him like a placenta, what is he? He is just a man with knowledge of anatomy, and illness, and how terribly wrong it can all go.
Suddenly cold, he pulls his shirt closed, fumbles with the buttons, succeeds in doing up one or two before he shakes with rigors and senses the world pulling away, floating grey spots where there used to be something solid. He plunges his head down between his knees, tries to stave off what seems to be coming. He sure as hell cannot afford to pass out now.
Sitting there, leaning forward, feeling the nausea rising in him, spitting out the water-brash that accumulates in his mouth, there is a flare of colour in his periphery. He looks up. Nothing. And then again: a streak of pale blue in the surrounding browns and greens and greys of the trees, the path, the stones. Over to the right, he sees it again, slipping behind a tree, and then between the tree and the boulder. A blue shift—the hem of a dress? He stands up, holds onto a tree for another wave of nausea, and scans the forest, takes a few steps closer toward the grove where he last saw it. He listens. He still sees nothing and so returns to the path and the boulder where he had been sitting.
Now his head pounds and he wipes his brow. Slippery with oily sweat. He sits down, rests his elbows on his knees again and stares at his hands—white, shaking. He clasps them together to keep them still, tries to stare at something immoveable—the carpet of dry leaves and twigs, a sharp-edged rock, a broken branch.
When he sees a glimpse of colour again, he springs up. He moves closer to it. Once he is standing where he is sure he saw it, he looks around. This time he sees a girl, or at least the shape of a girl; she is so far away it is difficult to be certain. He takes a few steps more and then sees her more clearly. She leans into a tree and gazes back at him. She smiles. At him. Then, swift and silent, she is gone again, farther up the mountain. Henry follows.
He climbs upward, his breathing coming fast and regular, the heat in him rising again. His trouser legs slowly unroll until they cover his legs, the cotton heavy and scratchy on his skin. When he gets to the next rise, he stops to catch his breath. The girl waits for him, sitting on a boulder just like the one he had been resting on farther down the mountain. The lightness about her, the ease with which she breathes, the dryness of her skin, all seem to mock him with his large, sweaty bulk that fights everything in his path, his footsteps obliterating everything beneath. The girl smiles at him again. Alile’s daughter? He is still not close enough to know for certain. Henry wonders if she followed him here, if she followed him from the moment he stepped out of Iris’s aunt’s yard. He feels somehow guilty for bringing her here, although he did nothing of the sort. He feels responsible for this child. It is like feeling responsible for the welfare of the mountain itself.
Now the girl stands up. She waves to him and then, swift as a bird, she is moving again, she is gone, disappearing into the mountain.
Henry lumbers onward, in the direction she went. His energy is spent by now, and he has little reserve to keep going, to keep pushing uphill. He slows down then stops at the next rise, leans against a tree, looks around. The girl is nowhere to be found.
Chapter 16
Iris leaves her grandfather’s hut after breakfast. By now, the sun is high and hot and she wishes she could discard her nurse’s uniform. She watches the women in their chitenjes with envy. How comfortable they must be, how cool despite the rising heat. Most of the women keep their heads low when she passes. She tries to place names with the faces she sees but she can’t. These people are strangers to her and today they behave like strangers, look away quickly. Some of the women eye her uniform with an unpleasant expression—a mix of dislike and distrust. Similarly her hair. She has
seen them looking at it. It is longer than the style in the villages, where women traditionally crop it close to their heads. Over the last few years, Iris has been growing it a little longer, more like the Western women—visiting doctors or nurses or students who come through the hospital—women who wander in from Europe, or Australia, sometimes America. Women who breeze through the wards smelling of herbs and flowers and freedom, women with soft, clean skin, women who never sweat, women who wear the cool, calm smile of suppressed shock and disgust, women who were never meant to see the things they see here, women who eventually acknowledge this, women who quietly slip back to the airplane that purrs on the runway and waits to lift them up and away, back to their homes, back to the safety of the West. Iris’s hair is long enough now to fit into a ponytail, which is how she is wearing it now, pulled back from her face with an elastic band, a short tuft of it protruding from her head, just above the nape of her neck. She cannot see it, but runs her hand over it, feels the stiff wiry strands, feels how it doesn’t flow like the slippery strands of the white women’s hair. No, nothing like those women.
A woman brushes past Iris on her way somewhere. “Pepani,” she says, as she moves along the main path toward the centre of the village. Iris wonders where she is off to so urgently. As she makes her way to her aunt’s house, she becomes increasingly aware of the village swept up in something.
She slips into her aunt’s yard and finds her aunt sitting on the back step shelling peas. Just like her mother would be doing. Iris wonders if her mother and her aunt were friends. They are sisters by marriage only. She cannot recall if they sat together, doing tasks like this in each other’s company. Her aunt’s lap is filled with the green shells. She looks up at Iris and smiles, shading her face against the sun. “Moni.” Iris sits down beside her and takes a few pods, begins to shell.
“What is going on in the village?” She asks her after a moment’s hesitation, unsure of whether she wishes to reveal her disconnect, her unfamiliarity with village life.
“They are preparing a feast for the harvest.” Her aunt continues her work, pea after pea dropping into the bowl beside her. Iris feels heat on her face: of course. Now that she has been reminded, she feels shame from her forgetting. All the memories of these routines and rituals, at one point integral to her existence, have gone missing, and she must retrieve them, one by one, from where they lie. She must reassemble her life here.
“I’d like to come,” says Iris.
“Of course,” says her aunt who then pauses in her shelling to glance at her. “You should cut your hair. You don’t want to confuse the ancestors. You don’t want them mistaking you for a mzungu.”
Iris nods. She feels her ponytail like an absurd growth; it moves along with her head, up and down, punctuating her acquiescence.
*
Henry leans against a tree and catches his breath. He looks down at his trouser legs, dark with sweat and dusty with the red-brown dirt of the mountain. His shirt hangs open and his chest feels cool while his back is sticky and hot, so he removes his shirt, drapes it over the bend of the tree trunk. He wants to take off his trousers, too, but decides against this, as wandering the mountain in boxer shorts, deserted as it is, is still beyond him, even now, even in this state.
He looks around. He can tell how far up the mountain he is by the sweeping vista to the plains below, the fields that fluoresce white-yellow in the noon-hour sun. He must be more than halfway up by now. He cannot see the peak. He can’t see Sapitwa up there, not yet. He remembers his climb with Ellison, weeks before. They started from a different side of the mountain, a different trailhead. Nothing is familiar here, not even the plains below.
And he is off the path. In his chase after the girl, he followed her deeper into the bush, higher up the mountain, and farther off the path. He can’t even hazard a guess as to where he might go to find it again.
There are no boulders to sit on here, so he lowers himself down to the grass—short, tough, wheat-coloured grass that prickles against his palms. He looks out at the plains below. He can’t make out any sign of a village. He wonders how far around the side of the mountain he has gone. He is not even sure if the village is to the right, or to the left. He acknowledges now, with the hot noon sun making white whorls in his vision, that he is lost.
Henry looks out and sees the flat pallor of the sky above the horizon. It gives no clues, remains as blank as the first day he arrived here, the day he touched down on African soil. The blue has been filling him, sweeping in on him like a rising tide. Soon it will be all he is. Impassive like the sky. Nothing surprises him anymore. It is impossible to feel the usual sentiments that his days at home had been crowded with. Even the prospect of being lost, alone on a mountain in hot sun without food, water, or shelter, does not jolt a reaction in him. He contemplates his running shoes—reasonable footwear, he thinks. The logo is obscured by dust and he can’t remember what it is anymore. His trousers are too hot. Cotton is idiotic in this climate. He wishes he’d worn his hiking trousers—the kind made of some quick-to-dry synthetic material and converts to shorts—these are the conveniences he’d scorned when coming here. He’d wanted basic. And here he is. Man against mountain. As simple as it gets.
Henry stands. He looks down the mountain at the emptiness stretching for miles. He turns around and looks up. Just a hundred metres or so and he will be above the treeline. There are rest huts there, planted up on the highest reaches of the mountain, and maintained by hut keepers. He recalls the welcoming scent of the cedar fire. The hot broth of the soup he and Ellison had cooked. If he were to climb farther, if he were to aim for the peak, he would be close to the hut where they’d stayed. From Sapitwa he would be able to see everything. From Sapitwa he could find his way home.
Chapter 17
Iris and her aunt join the crowd that flows along the main village path all the way to the centre where the feast is being prepared. As a child, Iris did little to participate in these rituals. She was too young, not yet initiated. Her role was a supportive one—fetching food and water and doing other menial tasks. As Iris moves along with the crowd, she brushes past a goat that canters away from the group, eyes rolling, nostrils wide. Somehow it knows it is at risk.
The crowd of villagers press toward the village centre, already wearing the mood of the ritual—jubilation, hunger. There are still hours to go before the event will begin but the collective energy swells in anticipation. Rituals to celebrate the harvest are joyful events, a time for music, dance and rest after many months of labour, and Iris is pulled along, feels the energy trill inside her.
When she first arrived in the city, Iris felt each missed ritual as a dull, lonely emptiness. She and her siblings once tried to recreate a ritual by making a fire in their small, urban backyard after their mother left for her evening work. They took turns approaching the fire, close enough to be uncomfortable, staring into it with their eyes fixed and wide like they had seen the adults do, and they practiced dancing like the fearsome Nyau. They fell asleep in the yard, and left the fire burning unattended. Iris remembers waking to her mother screaming. She looked like she was walking in fire; fire lit all around her, her hair smoked and flickered and glowed red, orange, yellow. Her eyes, though, were black. At first Iris thought her mother was burning, that she was the sacrifice that they, her children, had unintentionally submitted to the spirits. Their mother was who the spirits wanted, and so the spirits were taking her, consuming her in one enormous, burning swallow. But their mother was safe, untouched by the power of the flames. She walked through the fire without even feeling the heat. And then she doused it unceremoniously with bucket after bucket of water, her mouth a thin, straight line. For weeks afterward, their backs felt the burn from the switch their mother used on them. They never attempted a ritual again.
Iris and her aunt have been recruited to help prepare food and they join a group of women sitting under one of the baobab trees. Iris is han
ded a pile of long, thin palm leaves and asked to weave some platters and baskets for the food. She begins winding the leaves clumsily, large holes appearing between the leaves and then the whole weave slipping apart despite her best efforts. After some time spent struggling with her first project, one of the women clucks and takes the leaves away from her, points her in the direction of the cooking. She spends the next few hours staring into pot after pot of boiling cassava, her eyes red and her face wet and swollen with sweat and vapour. The women sing and chat. They tell stories. They laugh. Iris stares into the pot and listens. Then she closes her eyes and listens. She lets the harmony and melody of the songs and the chatter fill her up with their goodness. She begins to have that feeling again, the one she has missed for so long, the awareness that they are all from this small patch of earth, birthed from this soil, the soil they sit on as they sing, the soil from which their cassava and groundnuts and tomatoes grow, the soil that will welcome them all back when they are dead, the soil where their ancestors lie in watchful silence. How can she possibly remain a stranger here, when she has this undeniable connection to all of them?
She avoids touching her ponytail. She wishes she and her aunt had cut it off before coming here. She wants the smooth nape of her people. She admires them all, bowing their beautiful heads over their work, their generous smiles, their kind eyes. She steals these glances, these quick glimpses of her people before returning her gaze to her pot. She avoids looking up from her pot for too long, in case she is called upon to contribute something. A story or a song. This is the last thing she wants: to have all these women who know each other like sisters, staring at her, she the non-sister, the lost sister, the one with the Bad Luck. She just wants to spend some time with these women, here under the tree, she just wants to be with them for long enough that they will see that she will not bring back the luck that her mother took with her. That luck will stay in the city.