My Other Life Read online

  "I suppose the lepers might help me."

  "Pepani, Bambo!" Brother Piet exclaimed. Sorry, Dad!

  "You really can't do anything," Father DeVoss said. But he was speaking of the game. He collected the last trick and then began counting the cards stacked in front of him. His satisfaction and his remoteness touched me. Nothing of what I had said really mattered to him. He was very happy.

  "The kitchen and the bricks were Father LeGrande's idea," he said, smiling again. "He is now in Basutoland."

  ***

  There were no Africans at the outdoor kitchen the next morning. In the mottled shade of the scrawny trees the half-built kitchen looked like an old ruin, one of those useless walls or battlements the British had left behind. I carried and piled bricks for an hour or so, and then as I mixed some mortar in a pit I looked up and saw some Africans staring at me. I had not seen their approach—they simply materialized, squatting, three ragged men.

  They muttered, but none spoke to me as I continued the wall, scraping mortar and setting the bricks in place.

  "Do you want to help?" I asked.

  I used the plural, but there was no reply. I said it again in a matey way, using the word iwe —eeway—the bluntest "you" in the language.

  They laughed and grunted as though I had nudged them with my elbow.

  "Pay us some money," one said in English.

  "Ndalama," another said. Cash.

  I ignored them and went on laying bricks. They were still talking softly among themselves, and I had the impression that they were debating the issue of whether to help me.

  "It is your kitchen, not mine," I said.

  "Then why are you working on it?"

  "To help you."

  "It is your choice," the English-speaking one said.

  "Mzungus like to help," the third one, an old man, said.

  They left soon after, crept silently away, leaving patches of shadow, deep black in the white dust, where they had been.

  Feeling angry, I stayed there, laying bricks, wanting to be stubborn. I worked through the lunch bell and I was pleased when Birdie came over with a plate of nsima and beans, and a cup of tea. I needed her as a witness.

  "Father LeGrande would be happy to see you working here," she said. She was wearing a long blue skirt and a floppy hat.

  "I wish I had some help."

  She was smiling at the leper village. "They're lazy," she said. "They just don't want to work. They don't care whether it's done or not. We do everything for them."

  I was shocked by the casual brutality in her tone, and by her healthy, confident face.

  "They pretend to be sick," she said. "They laugh at us behind our back. And they're bloody rude. If we went away, they'd die or kill each other. They can't go home—they don't fit in."

  She was smiling—she wanted to shock me.

  "I'll send someone for the bowl and the cup," she said, and gathered her skirt so it wouldn't drag in the dust and headed for the dispensary, leaving me flustered.

  What she had said made her physically repulsive to me. I repeated it in a whisper to myself and, watching her making her way down the path, I found fault with the way she walked, her ridiculous hat, her raised elbows, the jumping of her skirt.

  The Africans did not come back that day. I worked until dusk, when the mosquitoes came out, and then I headed for the priests' house for dinner. I was too tired to play cards or read, and the priests were still awake when I went to my room.

  I did the same the next day. Birdie brought me food, and again she said, "And where are they? Sleeping in their huts while you work."

  "I am doing this for myself," I said. "This is my idea, not theirs."

  I ate the food while she watched, standing over me.

  "Why don't you sit down?" I asked.

  "Dust," she said, and smiled.

  "Have you stopped wearing your nun's outfit?"

  "I'll start wearing it again if you want."

  She went away laughing, and I thought: Do I dislike her because she says what I secretly think? I knew that I had begun to resent the Africans at Moyo for just the reasons she said.

  But I kept at it the following days, always starting just after breakfast and working through lunch until Birdie showed up with a plate of nsima and beans, heading home at dusk and arriving at the priests' house in the dark, when the path had been swallowed by night, and guiding myself by the pressure lamps blazing at the windows.

  I like this place because no one knows me, I thought.

  On the Friday of that week, I was walking through the leper village in the falling darkness, which was night mingled with dust and the smell of dirt and lamp oil. I heard a shriek, and a gasp, and a groan—the sounds of suffering coming out of the open window of a mud hut. I suspected that it was a woman being beaten, or perhaps suffocated by her husband. That kind of random domestic violence was fairly routine. This sudden brutality seemed like another aspect of the sexuality of the leper village.

  I went to the door of the hut, but seeing two women, one of them a nun, kneeling beside a mat on the floor, and another woman lying on the mat and gasping, I hesitated. A kerosene lamp lit only the room and the women; it distorted everything else, and outside the shadows were dark enough so that I could hover without being seen. I squatted down to watch.

  The woman on the mat called out again, and I could tell from the way she gasped, and the naked heap of her belly, that she was in the throes of childbirth.

  The white nun and the African woman spoke to her gently, and the nun held the woman's legs, bracing her. The African chafed the woman's hand to comfort her, and I could see that the woman about to give birth had a hollow between her thumb and forefinger—the tiger's mouth—and the fingers themselves were mangled: a leper.

  Childbirth scenes in movies, my only experience of a woman giving birth, I had always found excruciating: the screams, the hysteria, the upraised knees, the parted legs, the contorted face of the mother. But this was different, no more than muttering now, a labored breathing, a kind of sighing, as the midwives encouraged her. After another grunt the child was lifted into the yellow lamplight.

  "Mwana," the nun said. It's a boy.

  It was a perfect child, pinky gray with a full head of hair, all his fingers and toes intact. He dripped for a moment and then pissed—a narrow stream in the air—while he howled, growing pinker, as the women laughed in relief.

  When I got up to go, I staggered and almost fell, and wondered why. My eyes hardly focused. I seemed to see a small group of people, gathered in the shadow just beyond the reach of the lamplight. Was one of them Amina? I saw the smooth face and bright eyes and blue turban. I had the sense that she was looking at me and not at the hut, where the women were rejoicing. Then I was groping on the path in the darkness, and I thought of the man beneath the tree telling me, "I'm sick."

  5

  "I think I'll lie down," I said as I entered the priests' house. My voice was quacky and echoey in my ears, and I felt terrible, though I pretended to be well—just tired, as I had been each evening on returning from the kitchen outside the leper village. Tonight I tottered like a drunk trying to pass for someone sober.

  As soon as I reached my room I collapsed, my head aching, all my joints cracking. In seconds my skin was on fire and every sound was a howl in my head. It was as though I had been flayed alive, my skin peeled from my flesh to expose the naked white threads of my nerves.

  I lay in the hot darkness, with dust in my nose, dying. The fever took hold. I felt I was in the grip of a fatal illness, and I was sure of it when bony fingers squeezed my flesh wickedly, like pincers, in torture. Those skeletal fingers were the fever. I was too sick to be able to tell anyone. I could hear the clatter of plates; they had finished dinner, Simon was gathering the dishes, Father DeVoss snapping the playing cards, Brother Piet humming as he sewed. Father Touchette clutching his breviary. I groaned and could not get up from my bed. I regretted that I had shut and bolted the bedroom door.
r />   The overloud voices in the next room sounded in my dream. They were rough, indifferent men in stained robes, laughing as they played cards. They gambled while I lay dying. Each time I woke, greasy with my sweat, I felt frailer and more fearful.

  Help me.

  But the moan stayed in my mouth because I was too weak to cry out.

  I thought: They could come in here, any of them, and they could help me. They don't care!

  I shivered, I sweated. My heart drummed. The laughter—was it Brother Piet?—was sudden and explosive and the racket of it tore into my head.

  A shadow rattled against my eyes. It was a bat, flying back and forth in the room, the way I had once seen one flap in a barn. This fever bat was cut by the stripes of light from the cracks in the door frame. I watched the creature seeming to crackle in the broken light. I was not afraid, but I was helpless. The pain in my head and my bones paralyzed me, and my sense of powerlessness frightened me. I felt the thing swoop near my face, beating its skinny wings, and I got a whiff of its stink. The bat bothered me less than the intimation that I was dying, yet it seemed part of the paraphernalia of my death, like a funeral prop, a candle or an owl.

  I implored the darkness for one of the priests to look up from his hand of cards and think of me and show concern and break the door down. Then I would have a chance. But I was alone and I was trapped in this room. I was lost. They would not miss me until tomorrow, noon at the earliest, and by then I would be dead.

  This terrified me and made me so sad I began to cry again, like a child, not sobbing but whimpering and squeaking as I cowered.

  Then I was dreaming of enormous women, Birdie and others, with green skin and stupendous breasts and hot, scorching mouths, laughing at me and biting me, wrestling joyously with each other and casting me aside. Quite near me a leper woman with stumps where her limbs should have been turned away, and I realized that I was even uglier than she. Laughing at me, she twisted her nose off—it was like the damp prune of a dog's nose—and she reached for me.

  That woke me, but moments later I was in another dream.

  Every dream was a dream of enemies—of my weakness. I was overwhelmed and mocked and intimidated. Occasionally a giantess would throttle me while I tried to summon the strength to plead for my life.

  I was washed ashore onto a beach of broken bones, a foreshore crisscrossed by bird prints, spirals of their tracks which were neat and simple, like new letters of the alphabet. It was stony, with broken shells and pockmarked rocks and fragments of white wave-smoothed stones that gave the beach its look of doom, a place of dry bones and skull fragments. There were human footprints but no one was in sight. All I saw was an expanse of white sand. At first I felt the heat on my face, and hurrying across the sand I burned my feet. In the distance the sea was a deep blue, but brown against the shore, under a pale sky. The sun was directly overhead and blazing down upon me. I struggled on scorched feet to the edge of the sea and then tipped myself into the water and was scalded by the heat of a wave. The sea was simmering, and close up it was a foul stew of bubbles and weeds.

  I was jerked from this awful dream by the sound of drumming. Like the voices that had jarred me earlier, I had a hallucinatory sense of pain, my eyeballs aching, my ears ringing, not knowing whether I was asleep or awake. The priests were asleep—must have been. But the absence of their voices seemed only to make the drumming louder. It tumbled in a cascade of thumping, and it shivered and stopped before starting again, faster and louder.

  And I imagined I could see the dancers—toothy, grinning villagers, lepers and their families, ugly and stubborn, showing aggression, snatching at each other. Other shadows rutted under the dusty trees. The priests stood by saying nothing, their arms folded, while over the drumbeats I tried to call out, "Save me!"

  There was drumming in my dreams and when I woke the drumming continued outside the window, and I hated them—the dancers, the drummers, the priests especially, because they did nothing to stop it or help me.

  So the night went on. Was it one night? But the bat was real, and so was the laughter and the drumming. I was not imagining these things. I could have endured the dream, though. What was real frightened me: the pain in my head and the knowledge that I was small and sweaty and weak and sick, and that I would die before dawn. Knowing that was an agony.

  Without making a sound, I wept. Tears streamed down mv cheeks. I was afraid of death but after all those dark hours I wanted to die, to be rid of this pain.

  That was before dawn. Then I slept and dreamed in sunlight, which gave my dreams the bright colors of a crackling fire. The cockcrows reassured me, and when I woke at last to knocking on the door, I struggled out of bed and slid the bolt and collapsed. And then Brother Piet was kneeling near my bed and murmur ing, "Pepani, pepani" —Sorry, sorry—and fumbling with a thermometer.

  My temperature was 103. I thought: I know something I did not know before. But I could not remember what it was.

  I lay there too weak to raise my head, yet I was glad that I had been found. It had been a long, painful night, at the edge of death. I had sensed myself slipping away, unable to call out. Now I had a chance.

  Father DeVoss visited me, his hands behind his back. He said, "It's lucky you decided to spend your holiday at a hospital."

  I had not thought of Moyo as only a hospital. It was everything—a mission, a church, a village, a leper colony. It was for castaways—lepers and syphilitics and snakebite victims—with extravagantly ugly afflictions; and they lay disfigured and hopeless. because they had been cast out of their own villages. Not a hospital, but a refuge for desperate people. They were not sick, they were cursed.

  A fever was something else, a ragged pain that droned like a buzz saw in my head and throughout my body. I was not like those other people. There was no cure for me—I knew that much. You lived with it and you suffered and in a week or so you either got better or steadily worse, and even if you got better you were never the same again, because the fever killed something inside you. That was what Africans said of fevers, and now I knew enough of fevers to believe it.

  "It could be malaria," Father DeVoss said, lightly speculating. He did not seem concerned, and he stood to one side as Brother Piet set down a tray.

  "You drink this while it is hot and then I give you mankhwala," Brother Piet said. The seriousness of the occasion inspired more English words than I had so far heard him use. He offered me a cup of sweet, steaming tea. He dosed me with chloroquine, six tablets now, six more at noon, and paracetemol, to bring my temperature down.

  "Or blackwater fever. Even cholera. Or one of the fevers that doesn't have a name," Father DeVoss said. "But we'll treat you for malaria first, because we have the mankhwala for that."

  Drenched in sweat and gasping, I nodded and tried to smile and thanked them both in a croaky voice, glad that I had survived the night and that I had witnesses now to my fever.

  "I think Paul is feeling better already," Father DeVoss said.

  It had been an awful night. But now the attention of these kind men had raised my hopes and dulled my pain. I felt looked after, and I was reassured by Brother Piet's fussing. He carefully changed my sheets, and at once in dry sheets I felt calmer.

  Father DeVoss still smiled at me but in such a melancholy and benign way I felt he was blessing me. His forgiving eyes seemed to bestow grace. He was looking beyond my fever and my frailty to my soul, while Brother Piet was tending to my body.

  All that day Brother Piet and Simon the cook served me tea and made me gulp chloroquine tablets. When I grew feverish again in the early evening, Simon folded wet towels on my head to cool me and bring my temperature down. In the darkness of the night I still burned with fever, but I was less afraid. I prayed that I was on the mend, and when morning came—with the first light—I was more hopeful. I had made it through another night. Then it was hot tea and sour quinine and watery chicken soup that Simon made. As each day waned my temperature went up, my skin burned, my nerves ac
hed, my eyes began to boil in their sockets. And I was afraid again that I might falter in the darkness and die.

  The drumming continued, carrying through the trees and up the slope from the leper village. I could smell the sharpness of the dust that was raised by the stamping feet of the dancers. I easily imagined them dancing, bringing their feet down as though they were killing the fat white worms they called mphutsis. My fever intensified with the drumbeats and the darkness, giving me a kind of night vision that was also hallucinatory, and I saw them, the dancers—many of them naked, their gleaming bodies lit by flames, their black shadows jumping in my room.

  Through burning eyes I saw the young girl Amina flinging herself into the jostling mob of dancers, working her thin arms and legs, thrilled by the drums, her face streaming with sweat, her small breasts reddened by the firelight, her eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed. And then her cloth wraparound slipped and was trampled. She was entranced and did not notice, only became more sinuous, and brighter, her body like a single flame, while her granny stared with blind eyes, hearing the drums, perhaps wondering where the girl had gone.

  In her room in the convent. Birdie also heard the drumming. She too imagined the black sweating bodies, the crackling fire, the yodeling women. The village which slumbered in the dust all day came alive at night. Nothing in daylight mattered. I tried to think about what Birdie felt when she heard it—was she aroused or disgusted? She was excited, of course, but appalled at her excitement, and so she would pretend to disapprove.

  My fever helped me see it all clearly, not just the drumming and dancing, but the girl Amina, and Birdie, the nuns, the priests, sweating in their upper rooms, some of them praying. My illness fed me visions and made these people familiar. I knew them all better in my fever.

  And then I began to think that it was my lesson. I had to be sick and feverish and lying on my back, unable to form a word with my scummy tongue, to realize that any effort here seemed pointless.

  Simon went through the motions of bringing me wet towels and tea and soup and medicine. But neither he nor any of the priests seemed unduly alarmed. They did their duty and they were watchful. But their attitude was as fatalistic as the lepers'. How in this world of lepers could I expect sympathy for my fever? In spite of what they said, they looked upon me as someone who might die.