by Lucie Wilk
She kneels back down and continues spooning the relish, and then she passes around the nsima. Finally, she sits down on the mat, takes her plate, and begins eating.
Iris leaves soon after breakfast the next morning. She tells her aunt and Alile, “I’m going for a walk,” and sets off with her head down, ignoring the feeling of the women following her with their eyes. She walks out through the village, finds the path through the field. She walks along the narrow footpath, enjoying being alone. This is one thing she has learned: how to like being alone. She is aware of the paradox: the bigger the community, the more alone one is. It is nearly impossible to be alone in the village; everything is centred around community living here. Survival depends on it. One cannot last long being alone in this environment and she thinks again of Bryce alone on the mountain. If anyone can, he can, she thinks. He bumps and jostles with his environment and with the people around him, but remains unaffected. He carries about him a sense of control and in this, in this need to remain in control, he will never truly be affected by anyone else. He cannot. It would destroy him. She feels a wave of tenderness and pity, she feels her heart rush out to him, wherever he is, up high on Mulanje. Walking here, on this plain, she feels as though she can touch him and she tries to do this, tries to stretch out a piece of herself, thin and insubstantial as it is, out to him across the plain and up the mountainside where he lies somewhere weak and tired and alone.
This is where she and Bryce differ: she feels better when she has done this. When she has pushed out a part of herself into the world, when she has made herself vulnerable. The way he communicated: the cold, silent agreements, the immovable wall that existed between them, it nearly destroyed her in its sterility. But she found herself moving into it more naturally than she had expected she could, and this terrified her. Was she this capable of closing herself off, of losing her spirit altogether?
She watches her skirt swish swish swish with each step. It makes the same sound as walking through the grass. The colour of the plain, the sound of her skirt, the sound of the wind in the grass, the feel of the sun on her skin. All of this—she shares it with countless generations of ancestors and as she walks she moves into them, into the memory of them here on this plain, moving in this direction, feeling the sun in this very place in the sky, leaving this very brightness as spots in her eyes, burning a warmth in this very spot on her shoulders.
She doesn’t see the road when she reaches it; she sees burning red slice through the yellow savannah and she moves into the red and the sun feels even more hot and bright and she moves across it until she sees a darkness within the bright stretch of ground in front of her. She sees the stain on the road. Her ancestors remember. They remember all the living and all the dead and they feel him here, where he moved from one life to the next and the dust swirls up around her, creates a spinning cloud around her, until she almost disappears in it. And she stands in the middle of it and feels him as the man he was before he died.
She hears a sound. A very quiet sound, like the wind, but more persistent and growing in pitch and volume. The cloud around her moves away in one great sweep and she sees it coming up the crest, floating for an instant above the mirror that shimmers on the road, before it is on her, almost on top of her: the large, dark, noisy, hot hood of the car. It screeches and slides and skids for a few feet and finally stops, half off the road and within a few feet of her where she stands on the other side of the road.
She hears the grinding squawk of a door open. And there is a large white man, standing behind the door with his hands on his hips, then walking around the door past the front of the car and toward her.
“Iris?”
It is Dr. Ellison striding toward her, foreign in size and gait and voice and mannerisms.
“Iris! I nearly hit you! What were you doing standing in the middle of the road? You were covered in dust, I could barely see you. It is you, isn’t it?”
He comes closer and stands over her.
“You’re different,” he pronounces. He peers down at her. “Are you okay?”
“There were chickens.” She points to the road in front of her, between her and Dr. Ellison’s car. “There were chickens on the road and the man was trying to avoid the chickens when he hit my father.”
Dr. Ellison is silent for a moment, probably taking stock of the situation, taking stock of her. Then he says: “I’m sorry.”
Iris turns away. “Yes.” She looks out at the field past the car, looks at the grass flattened by two of the car wheels. She looks for the footpath back to the village but can’t see it from here.
“How’s Bryce? Back in the village?” Dr. Ellison takes a step toward where the footpath is hidden.
“He is on the mountain.”
She waits for the reaction, for the concern to cloud his face. But there is no darkening on his face, there is no worry. He has turned toward Mulanje and gazes upon it. Respectfully, she must admit. The mountain, from this vantage point and with all the morning sun on it, looks cheerful and bright. Reassuring. Perhaps she is overreacting. Perhaps this climb is recreational, just as it was when he went with Ellison a few short weeks ago.
Now Dr. Ellison nods. “He enjoyed our trip there a month ago. He really wanted to attempt Sapitwa. Maybe that’s what’s drawn him back.”
“Yes,” Iris says. She holds back her other thoughts. Dr. Ellison doesn’t want to hear of dark spirits, of lost souls. “He is a strong man.” She is not sure why this thought came out through her mouth, and clamps her lips closed.
Dr. Ellison sighs. “Too strong. Strong-headed.” He turns away from Mulanje and mutters: “Not the best place to be strong.” He looks down at her. “Sometimes a softness, a flexibility, is a good thing. Even bone bends under pressure. Did you know that, Iris? That bones bend?” He smiles and Iris feels a warmth from him that comes as a surprise. This rough, bushwhacking white man. So there is a softness even to him. She smiles back at him.
“How is the boy with the broken leg?” She asks this to break his gaze. She has trouble with this: holding gazes, sharing smiles, all this warmth passing between two people. “Is he recovering well? How is his leg?”
“He’s doing well. I think he’ll need to stay a little longer. He won’t get the rest here that he will in hospital. I’ll keep him until his cast is off. About four weeks.”
Iris thinks of the boy there in the ward with all those closed-eyed strangers.
Dr. Ellison adds: “He’ll do fine. He’s already making friends. He may even want to stay on. His father has found some family in town.”
Iris feels like crying and stifles what is rising behind her eyes. She looks down at her dress. The skirt hides her feet which she knows are bare and dirty. She feels Dr. Ellison sweeping his gaze over her appearance: her clothing, her hair.
“You look like you’ve settled in nicely here.”
She is not sure if he is being kind or cruel. She can’t tell these things anymore. She can’t read people. Only books. And she misses them, she realizes. She misses the books. In Blantyre, she made a habit of borrowing them, one at a time, from the library.
“It’s my home.”
Dr. Ellison looks at her. She can see he is surprised.
“I didn’t know that.”
When she says nothing, he takes a big breath in, fills that enormous rib cage with air. He puffs up even larger than usual. And then he lets it all out. She feels the wind of it on her face. He has no scent, not to his breath or his body.
“Well, I guess we’ll leave Bryce to his mountain, for now.”
Iris is quiet beside him. How much of her concern is driven by mere belief, a fear of the mysterious? She had thought that she had been away too long for this. But it is there still inside her—this irrational fear.
“So it looks like I’m on my own for the clinic.” It is in his voice—the ruffle to his feathers. “And you, Iris? A
re you coming? I could sure use your help. There’s a load of work waiting.”
She looks in the direction of the village as she speaks. “I would like to stay. I will wait for Dr. Bryce. I’ll make sure he’s okay. Then I can take a bus back with him.” She looks up at him and sees it there on his large face—the only reason he does not insist she accompany him. He thinks she is in love with Dr. Bryce. She can see that in his smile, that secretive little smile. Let him think it, she decides. Let someone somewhere think she is in love.
*
He is lying on something. It presses up into his abdomen and smells thick and organic like singed hair. When he rolls over, he sees that what has been pressing into him is a heap of bones—the long bones of arms, legs, fingers, ribs, the smooth flat bowl of the pelvis, the squat cylinders of vertebrae. Shapes barely recognizable, deformed by time, yet he can still see the grooves and condyles where they used to fit together, each yoked to the next but now disjointed, separate, meaningless in their fleshless clutter.
Inches away, he studies them, sees everything. They are not solid—even the thick outer ring of the cortex is fenestrated and full of air. Something about this bone, somehow he can see all its microscopic secrets: the delicate architecture, the spaces where the cells used to be housed in their individual lacunae, their tiny offices of ossification. Peering through the yawning cavities and between calcified arches, he can see how bone is built like men build houses: tall, arched doorways, open chambers, floors and ceilings. Built to bear the earth pushing up against it, built to withstand the forces that pull on it. Each calcific spire in this skeleton is a monument to all the burdens weathered, all the stress absorbed and transferred and shared.
But it is the emptiness that awes him; the space cradled between the spires. It is equal to what was built around it; without it, the stress could not have been borne. And this is the miracle: it still remains, it will never change. The ceilings and walls may degrade and erode, but the space cannot. It has always been here. It is still here.
He presses up off the ground but is stunned by vertigo and pain and his arms fold in. The ground tumbles up toward him and the hard dust of it slams into his face, his eyelashes sweep sand aside while he scans the tilted horizon.
There—straight ahead, along the ground that angles strangely, beside the heap of human rubble—the skull. It is pressed sideways to the ground just like him, two eye sockets swollen with space, bulging with the unfulfilled desires of a child.
His breath comes out hot and dry.
It was a child.
He shuffles and drags himself closer.
His finger across the blackened parts comes away dark with soot. Was this the mechanism of the death or was it an incomplete cremation, after death had already come and gone?
Is it possible for a cremation to be complete? For something—someone—to be completely transformed from solid to a flutter of light to heat and then gone into the air in a windless flight? There are always remainders, reminders. Like the memories that are still here occupying his every hour, minutes that creep across the face of a clock but leave nothing in their wake except the emptiness of time passed.
But now time is backing up, filling in.
Those gaping sockets are filling with flesh: abundant, liquid, living, vitreous, rich with blood and lymphatics and all the history that was behind him is now in front of him as the skull fills in and is blanketed with fat and skin and there are the eyes those eyes he knows so well.
Emma lies there sucking in the dusty earth and he gently lifts her head and places it on his cradled arm. His other arm is around her small thin shoulder that is as pale as the sun-bleached bone within it, and this pose is as natural as breath. Her small body, hot with sun or fever or both, tightens with each gasp and he knows that it can’t be undone any more than this, this is as far as history is willing to unwind so he clenches down with her paroxysms, breathes her breaths, feels her fear. A tear cuts a clean path through the dust on her face and he hugs her closer, pulls her hollow bones into his.
Chapter 21
Dr. Bryce has been found. High up on the mountain, at the base of Sapitwa, fallen and lost. This is how he is described to her: fallen and lost. And broken. Another broken man. It is Ade, her grandfather and Alile who attend to him first. Iris waits outside Ade’s khumbi. She hears nothing coming from inside. Is he even alive? But then, just as she stands with her hands up around her head, she hears him. It is a soft groan, or a sigh. And all the terrible feelings slide off her instantly and she goes back to waiting quietly outside the khumbi. She sits down on the step and waits.
She overhears a hushed discussion between Ade and her grandfather. The two men have already stepped out of the khumbi and circled around it to the back to talk. They are talking about what is wrong with Dr. Bryce. Ade thinks it is just broken bones from the fall. Her grandfather feels it is much more than that. Her grandfather wishes to perform a ritual that is much more intensive, even dangerous, but it is the only way to cure Bryce. Ade thinks such an intervention will be unsuccessful in a mzungu. They must modify their treatment, give the mzungu what he expects.
Even in the hushed tones, Iris can hear the rising anger. A disagreement between two sing’anga, between the headman and an elder: this is a very bad sign. Alile steps out of the hut during this conflict. She looks at Iris with wide eyes.
“How is he?”
“He is very ill. I hear nothing.” She looks inside the hut with her mouth flat. The women stand there and listen to the rising voices of the two sing’anga. Iris has never heard her grandfather become angry. She didn’t know what his voice could do. Now she knows: it becomes altered, strangled with the effort of trying to control it.
Iris looks at the entrance to Ade’s khumbi. A dark mouth. She puts her index finger between her teeth and bites. The pain from her teeth pressing into the skin, pressing up against her bone, keeps her here, helps her to think. She remembers seeing an x-ray of her hand, once. It was captured while she was helping to hold down a patient who was sick with meningitis, who could not stay still for the chest x-ray. She held his shoulder and there, pale on the blue-black film, was her hand. Even her skeleton was short and stout, each bone in her finger sturdy and irrevocable. The tips flared in a strange way. But there was an elegance to her structure, deep under all the tissue. An elegance and leanness that was surprising to her, but not unexpected. She knows there are secrets about her, secrets that could surprise and please.
She takes her finger out of her mouth and studies the teeth marks: two thin lines. She rubs over them and it feels good, rubbing away the bite. She looks at the door to the hut. She says to Alile: “I will go see him.” And steps through the doorway, past the curtain into the darkness.
At first she can’t see anything. Both her grandfather and Ade have no windows on their huts. There is always this blindness when she enters. A time when she is lost, if only briefly. And it seems, once she regains her bearings, that she is already changed somehow, more ready for whatever will occur in this place.
She can smell him. There is the sharp odour of body fluids. He has had diarrhea, and vomiting. She wonders how much fluid they have managed to put back into him. He must be dangerously dehydrated. She hears him shift in the darkness and wonders if he can see her. Iris moves toward the sound and she is beginning to see things. She can see the herbs and bottles hanging from the ceiling and now, on the opposite end, she can see a dark form on the floor: Bryce.
He lies on his right side, facing her. There is the jut of his shoulder and hip. And the looseness of his limbs spilling out from his torso, completely lacking in tone. His right hand is stretched out in front of him, turned up as if to receive something.
His eyes are closed.
His breathing is fast—in and out through his nose and partially opened mouth. A sourness travels on these breaths—a sourness tinged with death. She can smell it from here�
�Bryce’s death. Maybe this is what frightens her: the presence of death in a living body. Wave after wave of death coming from him in tides that rise higher and higher and pass over her head with a suffocating silence. She is overwhelmed by his almost-presence. No wonder the ancestors are silent.
Mother of God.
She hears her own raspy whisper move around the hut. Why does she say this now? It is something her mother would say, and it meant to Iris that her mother had completely disengaged from the village. Her mother began praying to a different god a long time ago, as long as Iris can remember, long before Iris’s arrival in this world. So why, then, is she surprised? She is this person: a part of her mother, her upbringing, raised in a city where this is usual. Of course this would be the first thing to rise out from between her lips when the time came.
She moves toward him and kneels down. He has opened his eyes in response to her whispered words. They are swollen and they open in slits. She can see the shining liquid between his lids—his consciousness gleaming from those narrow openings. His whole face is swollen and misshapen. She wouldn’t know it is him but for the telltale colour of his hair and his beard. Even in here, in the near-darkness of the hut, she can see its fiery colour. It glints red and gold. Even here.
She reaches out and touches his hand, the one that already stretches out from him on the floor. It is hot and dry. It does not move when she touches it. She sees that the wrist is swollen and is peculiarly angled. It must be broken. The leg that he lies on is also grossly swollen, the entire length of it distended, twice the width of the other. More broken bones. She wonders how much he has bled from these fractures. She wonders how they managed to move him here, all the way down the mountain.