by Lucie Wilk
No.
This, Iris knows to be as clean and clear a truth as there ever was. It is impossible. Her mother has proven this. And she, Iris, must eventually choose. A person cannot live in two worlds. She looks down at the rucksack between her knees, at her fingers woven into its fabric and wonders if her choice has already been made.
Chapter 24
Henry spends most of his time waiting for Alile. He waits for her to enter his world and when she does, he forgets what passed immediately before her arrival. When she is with him, he is a loose bundle of sensations. And today when Alile enters the hut, he closes his eyes. He listens to the activity of the surrounding village, muffled and remote, enjoys the cooler air on his skin, smells the thick, organic fragrance of the drying herbs and medicinal bottles, feels the presence of the bottles—dense, still, full of strange possibilities.
And then he feels her fingertips, touching lightly on his temple then sliding downward to cup his cheek. He opens his eyes and sees her, so close. Her solemn look. He reaches up for her hand, slides his fingers down the length of it, and she lets him.
This is some sort of love or kindness that is new to him. He has never experienced it before, not from a friend or a lover. A sad sort of kindness that binds two people, that knits them together. For now.
*
When Iris and Dr. Ellison arrive in the village, the sun is still high. She has lost almost three days travelling into and out of the city now. They walk silently through the field in single file—first Iris, then Ellison. They said little to each other on the drive. Ellison’s mood has been grim since she told him the news. He has been concentrating on this news as he does on a patient when he is working in the surgical suite—saying little, looking stern.
When the path opens up and the village surrounds them with all its colour and vivacious energy, they march right through it. Ellison moves in front of her and walks through the village as if the life around them is no more than a stage prop. If she didn’t know better, she would be embarrassed by it. His ability to ignore the smiles and nods, the efforts being made all around him to make him feel welcome. He walks on to Ade’s hut, nods briefly when she gestures toward it, when she indicates that this is where Dr. Bryce is being housed. He allows Iris to go in first, then he follows.
Here, just inside the hut, they both stop. The blindness stops everyone in their tracks. Dr. Ellison stands at the threshold and sniffs the air—Iris can hear him taking noisy deep breaths. She wonders what he smells. To her, the air is clean. Damp, yes, but no odour. The smell of death is gone and for a moment she fears that Dr. Bryce is gone with it, but then she hears a shifting in the corner. It is taking her longer than usual to regain her bearings. She feels her skin prickle. Fear? A warning?
“Iris.” The sound of her name being pronounced makes her jump. She looks to where it came from and then she sees the shape that must be Bryce. He is sitting, propped up on some blankets. She sees more of him, now. He is looking at them with a crooked smile.
She slides the rucksack off her shoulders, onto the ground, and feels coolness where sweat has gathered under the straps of the bag. She follows Dr. Ellison and moves over to Bryce and they both stand there, looking down at him. He looks better. Much better. He looks surprisingly well.
“Bryce.” There is relief in Dr. Ellison’s voice. “I must say I was expecting much worse. Iris told me … ” He glances at her, then decides not to elaborate. He leaves the sentence unfinished.
Dr. Bryce looks at her. “How are you, Iris?” It is said as though it is she who needs looking after.
He still has that smile on his face, as though he knows something. Something he will keep from her.
“We brought you something.” She lifts the pack a few inches off the ground and deposits it again.
“Oh?” He sounds only mildly interested.
“Antimalarials,” she says, “I think you have malaria.”
“Malaria.” He says this slowly, as though he hasn’t thought of it. How could it not have occurred to him?
“You have had a fever, and you have been vomiting. Diarrhea.”
“Yes.” He says. “And horrible stomach pains.” He brings his left hand to press into his stomach as if to test it, to see if it still hurts.
Iris lifts the bag again. Puts it down. She bends over it and opens the top, begins to pull out the intravenous line. She rummages for the vials of medication. She finds one and holds it up, turns it so he can see the label: Chloroquine. “You need this.” She says this firmly.
Bryce regards it strangely. He looks at the string of IV line as though it is a snake that has made its way into the hut. He hesitates. Iris is incredulous. Why does he hesitate?
“I’m getting better, Iris. Alile … ” For some reason he stops. Looks down at his broken hand and then looks toward the doorway.
Iris waits. She suppresses a rising wave of anger in her. After all this, she thinks. For God’s sake. After all this.
Dr. Ellison has been silent beside her, taking stock of the situation. He will come to a conclusion and will be immovable once he arrives at it. But Iris cannot wait for Dr. Ellison to say something. She saw Dr. Bryce’s death, smelled it, felt it so near, lurking in the corner of the hut with him, just a few days ago. Just like with Grace. It hunkered down and waited. It can be patient, she knows this. It will return. Something needs to be said. Something needs to be done.
“You don’t want this. You don’t want proper treatment.” The anger makes her voice tremble. She drops the vial of Chloroquine back into the rucksack. The IV tubing lies in a tangle on the floor. She kneels down to gather it. Why does she feel on the fringes all the time? Like life is moving on and she is always arriving late to the scene. She is never prepared. She is always the last to know.
Dr. Ellison finally shifts beside her. He starts to make a noise as though he is about to speak and then he does. He says: “Before we make any big decisions, let’s have a look.” He kneels down, pulls out his stethoscope and listens to things, feels Bryce’s pulse, prods his belly. Taps at his knees and elbows. Looks in his mouth. Looks at his eyes, the creases of his hands. “Jaundice,” Dr. Ellison mutters. He lays his hands on the broken leg, squeezes gently, rolls it back and forth. He palpates the damaged hand, which does look better to Iris, less swollen. Dr. Ellison sticks a thermometer in Bryce’s ear and when it beeps he reads it: “39.” A fever. She hears, in Dr. Ellison’s silence, his concern.
Through all this, Bryce has been looking up at the ceiling as though stargazing. Looking for falling stars. Even in this dim light, she can see that his skin has turned yellow. Sour yellow like bile. And his eyes are strange—the pupils have shrunk to nothing—pinpoints in the pallor of his iris. The whites of his eyes have gone yellow, too. The bile has seeped through him, stained him everywhere.
She feels a desperation that has nothing to do with how sick Bryce is now. It has to do with Grace. And she feels Grace, or the memory of Grace in the corner, well up inside her. How can this man decline something that could change the possibility of an outcome like Grace’s, could stave off death? This man who has wielded this power, saved others with it time and time again? The desperation turns to anger. She reaches for the rucksack again, where the plastic tubing hangs messily from it. She fumbles for the vial inside. “This will prevent it from worsening. Let me just … ” She reaches for his arm.
Dr. Bryce turns his head to watch her hold his arm. He watches her try to find a vein for a long time. And then he squeezes his fist, forces the veins to fill. It is as much of an acquiescence as she could hope for.
She opens up the rucksack again and reaches in to it, pulls out the lengths of intravenous line, pulls out the needles, the tape, the gauze, the bottles of medication. She thinks about her sister Grace as she does this, she imagines she is holding her sister’s arm to find a vein. She imagines she is wrapping the elastic tensor band
over her sister’s forearm and squeezing it tight, whispering “Shush, it’s okay” to Grace as she presses the needle to the skin, and as it punctures the skin and enters the vein. She imagines it is her sister’s blood—dark, red—that flashes back into the tube, it is her sister’s blood that is chased back into the vein when the IV fluid starts flowing. But it is Bryce whose body is lying on the floor when she steps away. It is Bryce who receives the medication. It is Bryce whose life will be saved.
Chapter 25
When Iris and Dr. Ellison step out of the hut and into the sun, Alile is standing in the yard. Iris wonders if she has been there all along. They did not ask permission. He is her patient, after all. This would never be allowed in the hospital; one doctor would never move in on another doctor’s patient without permission. And this shames her now: the audacity by which they just took over care. Iris is about to apologize when Alile speaks.
“Thank you.”
Iris nods. She feels Dr. Ellison hang back.
“They wouldn’t do anything for him.” Alile says. “They were willing to treat his bones but nothing more.” She turns to Iris, her eyes big and beautiful and youthful. So inexperienced. Nothing like the eyes of a sing’anga. “He needed so much more and I couldn’t do it alone. I couldn’t do anything, really. I just stayed with him.” She glances over at Ellison and then leans in closer to Iris. “Nthenda ya majini ndi mutu basi.”
“I understand.” Iris says. Spirit illness is a head ailment, Alile said to her, studying her for evidence of understanding, of confirmation of what needed to be done.
Iris moves forward and hugs her sister. It is the first time she has felt her skin against her own. She feels like a sister in her arms, her arms feels strong like her own. They have strength, both of them. This is what they have in common. But the strength does not come from their common bloodline. It comes from their fathers. A different type of strength from two different men. From their mother they have inherited something else, something harder to describe but equally important, perhaps more important: an intuition of sorts, the ability to feel things.
Iris releases her sister, moves back a little. She holds her shoulders and looks at her wet face. She will tell her another day. When she is more ready to hear it.
Alile leaves them. She steps back into the hut where Dr. Bryce lies, silently receiving his medication.
Dr. Ellison is regarding the hut, and seems to be listening to something in the quiet of this yard. His own thoughts. His preoccupied looks always make Iris uncomfortable. She can feel the scales tipping in his mind, over to a conclusion. Someone is always being judged. Circumstances weighed and considered. And what judgements has he passed on this village? Dr. Bryce has improved. Whatever remedies they spun out of the plants, the air, the earth. Whatever it was they did seemed to help, a little. Iris presses her fingers to her eyes. She wishes she doubted less. She wishes she believed more. Even Bryce has more of it: this belief.
Dr. Ellison puts his hands on his hips. “He’s quite weak. I don’t think we should try to move him today. See how he does with some fluid and antimalarials in him. We’ll try to leave tomorrow.”
Iris nods. She can’t imagine transporting Dr. Bryce to the car now, as big and strong as Dr. Ellison undoubtedly is.
“You’ll be okay here?”
Iris leans over and slips off her shoes, feels the warm earth under her feet. “Yes.” She turns to him. “And you? Where will you go?”
“I have a friend near the mountain. Runs a hostel. I’ll stay there.”
She nods again. She doesn’t know whether to be relieved or hurt that he doesn’t wish to stay here. He does not wish to become a guest in the village. She realizes later that she didn’t even ask but it wasn’t her place, really. This isn’t her home.
*
When Iris and Ellison leave, Alile enters. She moves swiftly to him and kneels at his side. She reaches out and gently touches the intravenous line which burrows under his skin. She follows the line with her eyes as it tracks up to the bag of fluid that they have hung from the ceiling in place of a bottle. He wonders if this has somehow disturbed the equilibrium of the healing room, if one bottle moved throws off the intricately balanced system. Her eyes come back to rest on him, on his face. She touches his forehead—light, feathery touches, then rests her hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry, Alile.”
She looks at him, shakes her head.
*
After Dr. Ellison’s departure from the village, Iris does not immediately return to Ade’s hut. She leaves Bryce there for a few hours, allows him to receive his medicine, and to indulge in his attraction to the sing’anga’s dried herbs, bark, roots and potions. She wonders if it is the malaria, gone to his head. She knows of such a thing, has seen it on the ward: cerebral malaria. How else would a sensible man hesitate when offered a lifesaving remedy?
Iris goes to her grandfather. He is there, waiting for her on his step, hands on his knees, sitting like a statue. She sits beside him. After shouldering so much burden, she is happy to drop it all. She leaves it at the doorstep of her grandfather’s hut. With her grandfather, she finally feels young again. With him, it is safe to be confused, it is safe to give up, to stop trying. She is not sure how much of her he can see through his cloudy eyes, but he can hear her, and he can feel her. He is always waiting for her when she needs him the most. He speaks little and listens well. He nods thoughtfully at the right moments. He asks the right questions.
“I went to Dr. Bryce today. I administered some treatment.”
Her grandfather nods.
“Ade and Alile have helped him,” she admits. “He looked better, but still very ill.”
Her grandfather shakes his head. He swats at a fly with a stick and shakes his head again. “They have treated the broken bones but have done nothing about the other things that ail him.”
Iris thinks about malaria, wonders if this is what her grandfather is referring to.
“They can’t do anything about that.” He continues. “Ade was right. It would be too difficult. Too risky.”
Iris wonders how her grandfather seems to have a finger on the pulse of the entire community. He spends long hours in a room in his hut with his shells and often comes out looking more troubled and thoughtful. She wonders how he would have knowledge about Bryce without ever visiting him, and then she remembers the shell he had given him upon arrival in the village.
“Does he still have your shell?”
Her grandfather turns his clouded eyes on her. Now both are affected by cataract and each day they seem more opaque. Finally, he says: “A shell, yes. Or a bone.” He says it importantly; in a way that accentuates the significance of her question, and his answer. And she wants this: to be pulled into the current of this magic alongside her grandfather, but still she stands aside it. She has lost the willingness to release reason—she grips it like a child holding tight to a helium balloon. And if she were to let it go, would it be lost forever? A shrinking pinpoint on the great blue expanse?
She says, “A bone. But I don’t see how it … ” Here she pauses, trying to explain where she stops short, what she is having trouble with.
Her grandfather stands up abruptly, throws the stick he is holding to the ground. “See?” Even his voice trembles. “Why must you see? Kumva! Listen!” The cataract clouds are white blooms over his pupils. He must be completely blind. And he stares at her with those clouded eyes, shakes with his disappointment in her, in who she has become, and who she must have left behind.
Chapter 26
There has been a death. And there will be a funeral rite. He was an important man, a brother of the headman of a neighbouring village, and the headman has called upon the Nyau men to visit as a medium, an in-between, overseeing the passage of this man safely to the world of the ancestors.
Iris joins the women in the common kitchen area. The wa
iling of the women has already begun, it carries from the dead man’s hut and continues on. Although the family grieves, the mood in the village is a strange mix of raw grief and anxious excitement, no doubt driven by the anticipation of the visit by the secretive Nyau. The women, when Iris arrives, are chatty. They smile and nod to Iris as she enters the group. They find her a task and someone takes the time to give her brief instructions. She is to grind the maize that will be used to make nsima. Although all over the village there are bags of mill-ground maize for this daily staple, when there is a ritual the flour must be ground by hand. Iris stands beside an urn, her hands on the pole that will be used to grind the maize, and looks around. Standing here, on this land, with this pole in her hands and as she rotates the pole and begins to grind the grains, as she creates the vibration that she can feel in her feet, Iris knows her ancestors can feel it too. She can feel their approval, she can feel their hunger. She knows that she is meeting the needs of the village, and the needs of those who came before them, who gave them life, who wait for acts like these to confirm that they have not been forgotten.
Iris leans into the pole, puts more of her body into the grinding, feels the tight ache in her muscles, feels the sweat collect between her breasts and on her forehead. She closes her eyes, moves her body and begins to sing. She joins the women in the song that gathers around her and in her and helps her grind the maize.
Maybe it is her grandfather’s anger that makes her start thinking this way. Or maybe it is what Alile said after they treated Bryce in the khumbi. Imalowa m‘mutu. The spirit enters the head. Iris doesn’t believe it, but still she thinks it. Maybe it is the old Iris, the one her grandfather is mourning, who reaches up from deep inside her to plant the seed in the shallow soil of her mind. All her adult life, she hasn’t given much attention to matsenga. When she heard it uttered by patients, or patients’ families, she usually rolled her eyes. Even the mention of it was a source of embarrassment, a superstition she wanted to hide from the world, the foreign doctors, from herself.