Harmattan (26 page)

‘Why are they blocking the bridge?’ I said.

‘Like many of us, they are angry that they have not been paid their allowances.’

‘Won’t they let us through if we tell them we’re on our way to the hospital?’

He sighed. ‘I’m in uniform, Haoua. They’re more likely to tear me limb from limb! And it’s not safe for you.’

‘But you haven’t been paid either, Abdel!’ I reminded him.

‘I doubt if they’d stop to check,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’s also crawling with gendarmes and soldiers down there. If I didn’t get mauled by the protesters, I’d most likely get seconded into duty. Sergeant Bouleb said he’d watch my back for a couple of hours, but in truth I’m AWOL, so I can’t afford to be explaining myself to some irate captain. It could get ugly down there. Angry students, trigger-happy militia. That bridge has hosted a blood bath before today!’

‘What is
AWOL?’
I said.

‘It means I don’t have an official pass. We’ll just have to cross further up.’

As we sped away from Pont Kennedy, a convoy of military vehicles thundered past us, heading for the river.

April is the hottest time of the year in my country. Even the rush of the motorcycle did little to cool me; the air baked breathless by a fierce midday sun. The machine dipped and leaned and zigzagged and I clung to Abdelkrim as we sped along Niamey’s grand, wide roads; the urgent, beseeching words of my prayers trailing behind us like so much smoke. I took comfort in the sight of the majestic towers and minarets of the Grande Mosquée as they rose before us, strangely familiar to me, even though I had only ever seen a picture of the magnificent building in one of Monsieur Boubacar’s reference books. The engine screamed below us as we charged past taxis, cars and trucks, and still this wonderful, sacred giant seemed to linger to our left, floating on its vast – now deserted – forecourt of diligently trodden dust and sand. I tried to imagine its swarming congregation, flocking here to worship the Almighty God above. There and then, I vowed to witness such a spectacle. Releasing my grip on my brother’s waist, I clutched behind my rump at the motorcycle’s seat, leaned back and peered upwards into the empty, parched sky, the breeze snapping the tails of my head wrap about my cheeks and eyes like angry serpents.

‘Merciful God,’ I said, ‘watch over my mother!’ I felt Abdelkrim’s hand, searching, questioning my shift in weight.

‘What are you doing, Haoua?’ he shouted over the whine of the engine.

‘Nothing.’ I wrapped my arms around his waist again, closed my eyes and waited.

Somehow I had expected l’Hopital Nationale de Niamey to be grander: a building to rival the Grande Mosquée, or at the very least a large, clean, white structure – like Citibank or Sonara.

Instead, its exterior was yellow, like bad teeth, and shrouded in a mantle of hopelessness and dread. Despair seemed to seep from these very walls as we approached and a sickly stench, perhaps of fear masked with disinfectant, reached my nostrils even before I had dismounted.

Small groups of bewildered looking citizens loitered around on the hospital steps and veranda. A queue of people – mostly pregnant women and small children, some with orange hair and distended bellies – meandered into the foyer and through a set of scuffed double doors.

A tatty white pick-up truck with a canvas top and a faded blue cross marked on each of its doors had been parked near the entrance. An orange-roofed taxi pulled into the shade of the building, just ahead of where Abdelkrim had parked the motorcycle. The driver was shouting excitedly in Hausa but I could not make out exactly what he was saying. As we approached the vehicle, I saw him lean across his seat to spring open the rear door. Immediately, a pair of dust-caked feet spilled out towards us and began kicking and thrashing about wildly. The driver craned his neck towards the opening and called out in French as we came alongside his taxi.

‘Can you help me with this fellow, brother?

Abdelkrim leaned into the car. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘A teacher over at La Poudriere flagged me down and asked me to bring him here,’ the driver said. ‘Apparently he collapsed during class.’

I squeezed up beside Abdelkrim and was immediately gripped both by pity and disgust as I gazed at the boy on the back seat. He looked a little younger than Adamou and, despite the tortured grimace that he now wore, I could tell that his face was handsome. His eyes were wide with terror and pain. Rivulets of sweat trickled from his brow and into their sockets. His lips quivered, thick dollops of gluey spittle spilling from the corners of his mouth.

The driver had clambered out of the vehicle now and opened the other rear door. He put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and tried to prevent him from knocking his head against the car seat.

‘Isn’t there anyone with him?’ Abdelkrim asked.

The driver shrugged. ‘None of the teachers could leave their classes. They told me he walks from his village to the school every day – two hours each way. Help me get him out, Monsieur!’

Abdelkrim nudged me gently out of the way and then took hold of the boy’s sodden tee shirt. ‘Bring him towards me,’ he said to the driver.

The boy was shivering, his torso heaving uncontrollably and, as the two men tried to manoeuvre him out of the car, he drew his knees up and curled himself like a ball, his frame now wedged.

Abdelkrim stood up and shook his head. ‘We’re going to need more help,’ he said, wiping his hands on his tunic.

The taxi driver was about to speak when two hospital porters in green tunics appeared, one of them carrying a rough board.

‘We’ll take him from here,’ the youngest of the porters said, throwing the board on to the dust and going around to the far side of the car.

His colleague looked at me and gave a little chuckle, then he leaned into the car, grabbed at the patient’s ankles and yanked. Again the boy began flailing his limbs around.

The taxi driver came and stood beside my brother. He clapped Abdelkrim’s arm and tutted. ‘
Walayi!’
he said. ‘Thank you, brother.’

Abdelkrim nodded. ‘What do you think is wrong with this boy?’ he said.

‘I’m no doctor, my friend,’ the driver said.

‘Clear case of malaria, I’d say,’ the younger of the porters called from within before he and his colleague managed to wrestle the still thrashing body out of the car and on to the wooden board.

‘Of course, he’s no doctor either!’ the older man said, chuckling again. ‘But I shouldn’t think this one will have long,’ he added, lifting one end of the board as his colleague did the other and lugging the unfortunate village boy up the hospital steps, past the queuing people and through the gaping doors. It was only then that I noticed the heavy staining on both men’s uniforms.

‘Can’t they be more gentle with him, Abdel?’ I said, as we watched them disappear.

Abdelkrim put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Let’s find Mother,’ he said.

During the months that my mother had been in hospital, my brother had visited her as often as his job allowed. Before we climbed the steps to the hospital’s main entrance he drew me close to him, took my hands in his and went to considerable lengths to ensure that I understood just how ill she really was. His words had frightened me but, now, as I followed him through the stark, empty corridors and up several flights of stairs, the click of his leather boots and the slap of my plastic sandals echoing through the eerie gloom, I had no doubt that I was only moments away from being reunited with my poor, sweet mother.

The sight of the malarial boy outside had disturbed me greatly, yet already I was focussed on the gravity of my own family’s situation and I took comfort from the fact that soon I would be able to hold my mother’s hand – however weak it might be.

At the top of the stairs, we passed a sign with large, neatly painted blue letters and an arrow directing us to
Salle Trois.
My brother led me through another set of double doors that opened into a hellish, crowded room full of metal-framed cots and beds packed together so tightly that in places there was barely room to squeeze between them. The smell, which I had first noticed beyond the steps of the hospital, had not seemed as offensive on the stairwell, but now it hit me again with an intensity that surprised me.

Worse still was the noise: a disturbing babble of flemmy coughing and wailing babies.

Abdelkrim stopped in the doorway, turned to look at me and put his hand to his nose and mouth; I did the same.

Our passage through
Salle Trois
to the foyer of
Salle Quatre
seemed to take forever. I inched my way through the long, stinking, white-washed room as if in a dream, filled with shame at being fit enough to do so. No bed or cot was occupied by less than two women and several also supported two, or sometimes three, young children. Drip stands and tubes, like the one I’d seen Mother hooked up to in Sushie’s
dispensaire
, stood at the end of several beds. The women’s faces were wan, their eyes empty. Their tight, hardened mouths looked like they might never again be capable of conversation or pleasantries, or a gentle mother’s smile or kiss. Many of the babies lay staring listlessly at the flaking ceiling, while their mothers fanned them with their hands or tattered copies of
Le Sahel
. A tiny tot, naked from the waist down, stretched out his hands towards me as we passed the end of his shared cot; his face contorted with misery, layers of tears encrusted on his thin, dusty cheeks, his cracked lips pale and grey. I paused for a moment and looked up at Abdelkrim. He nodded and then took me gently by the elbow, just as the child gulped a deep, raspy breath and issued a piercing shriek of desperate protest.

The relentless crying and hacking coughs heralded us into
Salle Quatre
like a nightmarish fanfare. The stench of diarrhoea and vomit again hit me as we entered this ward, similar to the last, but more crowded still. The left hand side of the ward was crammed as before with white painted, metal-framed cots and beds, but the right hand side was laid out only with thin mattresses, placed directly onto the hard, tiled floor. For months, my brother had been bringing food to the hospital for my Mother – it was a requirement that families made such provisions for their kin – and now, as he pushed purposefully and quickly towards the far end of the room, I felt a strange sensation: anticipation, excitement, dread – all combining, so that suddenly I broke into a cold sweat.

‘Oh, Almighty Father,’ I prayed, my eyes closed tightly as I trudged behind Abdelkrim. ‘Deliver our mother from this place!’

When I opened them again, my brother had stopped before one of the cots. An empty drip stand stood at its end, like a little toppled silver question mark. I followed Abdelkrim’s puzzled gaze and was confused to find that an old woman and two tiny babies occupied the bed. I peered deep into the woman’s hollow, vacant eyes, momentarily wondering if this might indeed be my mother. She looked through, rather than at me.

‘Where is Azara Boureima, Madame?’ Abdelkrim said to the old woman.

She did not raise her eyes to meet his.

At the next bed, two healthcare personnel were discussing another patient.

Beside them, a woman sat rocking backwards and forwards and muttering to herself.

Abdelkrim reached across the bed and touched the young nurse’s arm. ‘Where is my mother?’ he said, and now I thought I could hear fear in his voice.

The nurse fidgeted with her clipboard and shrugged apologetically before turning to look at her superior, an older, burly woman, heavily adorned in jewellery and trinkets and dressed in a white coat and the most beautiful blue and green
pagne
and matching head wrap I had ever seen.

‘Young man,’ the older woman said, abruptly, (she spoke French in an accent which by now I had realised was particular to Niamey), ‘I’m Doctor Aissata Palcy. If you and this girl will be so kind as to wait in my office, I will speak to you presently.’ She pointed her stethoscope towards a booth at the far side of the room, took her other hand out of the pocket of her unbuttoned coat to prod a listless form on the bed and then turned to address the nurse again. ‘What do we have here?’ she said.

The nurse gave a little apologetic smile in our direction before responding to Doctor Palcy’s question. ‘This bush woman arrived earlier with her two children,’ she said, pulling back a blanket. ‘This one has just died.’

‘And what about the other one?’ the doctor said, untying the rocking woman’s 
pagne
and extracting a tiny baby from a bundle. She fingered the few tufts of orangey hair still left on the baby’s head. ‘Have you given this child some water?’ she said, addressing the mother.

The rocking woman steadied herself, then shook her head. ‘No, Madame,’ she said, shrugging and spilling one hand out towards the doctor. ‘She has diarrhoea. I thought it best not to.’ She dropped her head and began to rock again.

Doctor Palcy tutted impatiently, as if she had heard such a response many times before. She pinched the skin around the now squealing infant’s belly button. ‘On the contrary, my dear! You must give such cases liquids!’ She turned to the nurse again.

‘Rehydrate her and give her the malnutrition treatment to begin with,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that she doesn’t end up like her brother.’

She turned briskly then, but the rocking woman caught her coattail. ‘I sold all my clothes to pay the marabout!’ she wailed. ‘I sold all my trinkets to pay the healer! He told me that my son was possessed by the spirit of his dead twin Dominick! He told me that Yanou would live!’ She released her grip on the doctor’s coat and buried her face in her hands.

Doctor Palcy smoothed down her coat and shook her head. ‘That has nothing to do with your children’s illness,’ she said, moving on to her next patient.

Doctor Palcy’s office is a place that I will remember, vividly, for the rest of my life.

Separated from
Salle Quatre
only by a thin partition with a glass door, Abdelkrim and I were in no way protected from the sights, sounds and smells of the hell outside. The familiarity of the room surprised me: it was quite different to Sushie’s treatment room in Wadata, but many of the objects with which it was furnished were similar to hers.